The Promise of Adolescence Realizing Opportunity for All Youth (2019) / Chapter Skim
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10 The Scientific Opportunity
10 The Scientific Opportunity
Pages 347-356
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From page 347... ...
It was believed that life experience was the primary distinction between adolescents and adults with respect to a host of human functions and behaviors -- including domains such as self-regulation, cognitive judgment, and decision making. The emergence of developmental neuroscience has profoundly challenged that idea, pointing instead to ongoing fundamental changes in the adolescent brain -- changes that continue beyond the teenage years and into the mid-twenties.
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From page 348... ...
DATA LIMITATIONS Although our knowledge about adolescence is growing rapidly, considerable gaps remain in pertinent data bearing on adolescent outcomes across sectors. Regarding health outcomes, for example, a 2007 review lamented the scarcity of data regarding specific health status or health objectives (e.g., increase the proportion of adolescents who engage in regular physical activity)
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From page 349... ...
In some cases, as with respect to sexual orientation and gender identity, researchers may fail to collect information on these characteristics altogether, and some youth may be uncomfortable or feel unsafe disclosing this information. Sixth, some adolescent outcomes that researchers believe to be important in terms of influencing adult outcomes are not easily collected.
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From page 350... ...
To harness the promise of adolescence, our nation will need to grapple with these two underlying realities: This critical period of life is ripe with opportunity for learning, growth, and development, which can be utilized not only to launch extraordinary career trajectories but also to remediate previous developmental setbacks during childhood. Yet persistent inequities in social and environmental conditions curtail opportunity for many adolescents.
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From page 351... ...
Is brain development a better indicator than chronological age of readiness as to when an adolescent can optimize the benefit from specific educational curricula? Of course, in answering these questions it will be necessary to understand nature and correlates of individual variation in adolescent behavior and development, as age is an imprecise measure and brain maturation varies as much across ages as it does within ages (Galván, 2014)
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From page 352... ...
; and • studies specifically designed to test optimal timing of interventions, posing questions such as "What are the trajectories of true develop mental change in connectivity within and between neural networks implicated in cognitive control and emotional processing? Are these trajectories of change steeper or quicker during some periods than others potentially providing key windows for input and interven tion?
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From page 353... ...
For example, if a specific brain region or channel of connectivity between brain systems is discovered through a lab-based functional MRI study, before researchers move to assess inter vention implications it is important that their next step be to replicate these effects behaviorally in the youths' social context. In other words, just because a brain pathway appears to light up when doing a task in a scanner, this does not prove that the same pathway will light up in the real everyday world, when peers, family, and other contextual factors are present.
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From page 354... ...
Individuals included in MRI studies have historically been individuals participating in federally sponsored research, often through a university medical facility. As a result, most of these studies have not been fully representative of individuals living in poverty, including ethnically diverse participants, those without medical providers, and those from rural areas.
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From page 355... ...
For example, improving developmental trajectories in early adolescence (e.g., through health, education, and social development) can be an effective strategy for preventing many of the behavioral and emotional health problems that typically emerge in late adolescence -- including the increasing rate of substance use, depression, anxiety, suicide, and school failure.
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