Slashdot Mirror
No Video Games on School Nights
Donkey Konga writes "In the latest round of the ongoing debate on the effect of video games and TV on academics, a new study in Pediatrics says that any amount of gaming is too much if if happens on a school night. '"On weekdays, the more they watched, the worse they did," said study coauthor Dr. Sharif. Weekends were another matter, with gaming and TV watching habits showing little or no effect on academic performance, as long as the kids spent no more than four hours per day in front of the console or TV." Of course we all know that correlation does not equal causation, but the study is sure to get many parents thinking about how much time in front of the Xbox and idiot box is too much."
MODERATION is the key here. When I was a kid, my parents limited everyone to 1 hour on the computer per day once all the chores and homework was done. My family did just fine academically, thankyouverymuch. Remove the kids who spend an average of 2 hours or more after school in front of the TV or computer and see how the statistic looks.
While the study may be correct in its findings, I must take issue with your conclusion, "[T]he study is sure to get many parents thinking about how much time in front of the Xbox and idiot box is too much."
If history is any guide, the parents who have failed to monitor their childrens' study habits and recreational activities in the past will continue to do so. And those parents who have been responsible in their child-raising duties will also continue to do so.
The study will have no effect whatsoever.
Yes, IAAP. (I am a parent.)
Trust not a man who's rich in flax / His morals may be sadly lax
That's one of the benefits of being a parent/adult who has finished their schooling and is working to feed/educate/entertain their children. When the kids grow up, get their own job and start paying their own way, THEN they can watch as much TV as they want on a school/work night.
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
87%? So you're pulling a B-B+ average in high school...that's not that great. Maybe if you didn't dick around on the computer/net you could be an A student looking to go to a private school w/ scholie instead of the BS State.
Judging by the Ars article, the survey considered TV and gaming to be the same activity. This somehow strikes me as completely wrong. Certainly it's no basis to be drawing conclusions about gaming. All it says is that TV and gaming, in some combination, can harm performance. Cigarettes and sitting on wooden stools, in some combination, can give you lung cancer, but you won't see me selling the stool.
Are you a counter-example or were you simply unchallenged by the school curriculum?
Being the top of your class because the course is not intended for exceptional students does not mean that games helped or hindered you. It simply means that you were too advanced for the class you took. If this allowed you additional free time to play video games, that is a failing of the school system.
It seems to me that moderate use of video games is only part of the solution. Ultimately, it comes down to parental involvement and interaction. When I was growing up, my mom and I often played the Atari 2600, NES and SNES together. She made it a point to just sit back and watch sometimes, too. This actually served two purposes:
She had supervision over the game console use and game content. She knew what kinds of games I played, how long I played them for, etc. This made it remarkably easy for her to anticipate which games to buy for me as gifts or rewards... Not to mention the fact that she played the hell out of Zelda, Super Mario Bros., Metroid and Tetris whenever I wasn't playing.
She also gave me encouragement as I played — sometimes offering other possible avenues of action when I was stumped, soothing words when I was frustrated, or positive reinforcement upon completing a major game objective. If I was acting too rashly in response to a game's difficulty, she would make me quit until I calmed down and approached it again with a fresh perspective and a cooler head.
Ironically, her method of coaching helped to sharpen my natural tendency for analytical thinking, further reinforcing it with the (sometimes negative) quality of persistence (some would also say stubbornness) in coming to an understanding with a thing or concept, or completing a goal. Parental involvement is A Good Thing(tm) for all involved, and a lot of parents nowadays have become disappointingly lax in that department.
One of the best things to do to encourage that such involvement or observation actually takes place? Put the console in the living room. If a kid is going to have his or her game machine and/or computer in their room, that's likely where they'll spend most of their time, thusly putting them outside the sphere of parental influence. Putting the console in a common, non-private area will give the parent(s) the opportunity to regulate usage and observe their child in action; it also affords the parent(s) an opportunity to see how their child reacts to and interacts with the game.
And believe me, if the infamous Chocolate Milk video is any indication, a lot of these kids seriously need parental intervention. I can say, thankfully, that I've never acted like such an out-of-control heathen — I knew the fear of MOM, not God.
Some of the younger generation may look at such a suggestion with great disdain, but take it from someone who actually had a parent take the time to get involved — it may seem lame or embarassing, but is A Good Thing(tm). It's also a necessary thing. Take the time, parents; it does make a difference.
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Yeah... the thing is, students who do the best in high school are generally either one of two types. Naturally gifted and don't have to work, or hard workers. Hard workers would also tend to say they did well, considering they put in their best effort. They would play less video games and watch less tv because they have less time to do so because they're busy doing homework. For those who are naturally gifted, many figure, why bother, I could get a 97 if I tried, but a 92 still gets me a 4.0. So instead, they watch tons of tv or play video games to fill spare time, and then say they could do better, despite being top of the class.
Personally, I averaged a 94 in all honors classes while watching 8+ hours of TV a day and yet would have said that I could do better because i never tried hard. That's partially why they got the results they did, because they didn't look at academic performance, just feelings about performance. For a valid study, they need to sample a few random high schools, but take like ~100 students from each, then compare class rank to TV watching/video game playing.
...such as soccer practice, playing in the front yard, or reading comic books.
Face it, we all have limited time, particularly on weekdays. After dinner, getting ready for bed, baths, etc., there's limited time for homework or study. If you waste it, children will do worse, no matter how you waste it.
My wife and I limit our first grader to 30 minutes on the PS2, assuming that there's time, he'e been good at school, and that he'll complete his homework (which isn't that much) before snack time before bed. Anybody with an ounce of common sense could tell you that his academic work would suffer if we reduced study time to allow more play time, regardless of whether or not it was on the PS2 or playing Mille Borne or Sorry! or any other game...or even just playing with Legos.
This is a time management issue, not a video game issue.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
You can't possibly mean they should actually parent??!!
I'll be enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it
I'm a hardcore gamer. I'm also a game programmer. I've been a hardcore gamer since about age 12, playing around 15-25 hours of games a week. My GPA in high school was a 2.2. My GPA in college is a 3.4ish. Why the difference? Because I didn't care about high school, as it was boring, slow-paced, and had no interesting material with lots of rules in place for the sake of saying "we have rules." My college is much different, as I'm actually developing games. So, my question is, why care about grades? Is the child learning? If not, figure out why and fix the problem. For a vast majority of gifted children out there (I was one of them), as you get older, public schooling becomes more of an impediment to learning, rather than teaching you more.
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
These kind of philosophies bother me. Why don't we just lock kids in cells on school nights? They'd preform great academically! I for one was not allowed to own video games for many years. When I got my first N64 (which was an out of date system by then) I played it non-stop. Granted I was homeschooled, so I don't know how it would've affected my grades, but I certainly would argue that abstinence is not the answer. This is one of many parenting ideas which creates mindless zombies out of kids who can't make rational decisions on their own. Give them no freedom, and they'll go to college and party. Teach them moderation, and consequence especially, and they won't flunk out when you send them to community college. =P I would even go so far as to say it would be better to let them drop their grades once and ground them to teach a lesson, rather than hold their hand all the way through grade school and high school, then let them flunk out of college on their own.
Did this study operationalize "students with controlling parents" vs. "students without controlling parents", or what this a study of "controlling parents deny gaming on weekdays" vs. "controlling parents who do not deny gaming on weekdays"? This is the question here. GIVE KIDS LIBERTY AND THEY WILL MAKE THE RIGHT CHOICE!
I really doubt that's a vast majority any more. Those jobs that don't actually require learning time off the job are either total dead ends, or ones where it's hard to get enough halfway decent people without training them on the clock. Even for the latter, you mostly have some opportunites for advancement and promotion, where additional effort on your own will increase your success. You'ld better hope it's not a vast majority either, as you're describing the kind of jobs that will soon be replaced by machines. I certainly hope your own job doesn't feel like that, even one hour in forty.
Plus, if the kids see mommy and daddy (or whatever) bothering to learn things on their own, whether for the existing job, a new one, as insurance against being trapped in a moribund industry, or just from curiosity, they won't give you nearly as much arguement about studying, and they will earn your good study habits naturally. Even a little good example goes a long way here. Just letting your children see you read matters more than most people think.
Frankly, a lot of the objections I'm reading here sound like people who don't have any good study habits to pass on, don't much like learning or encouraging their children, and are content to let a dead end job become a dead end life. Sometimes I still come here clinging to a tiny, forlorn, dusty hope that Slashdot averages better than that - way to crush my hope guys! (And no, I'm not new here.)
Who is John Cabal?
Books are "interactive" by my standards in that for the jumble of characters on the pages to become meaningful, you have to actively give them meaning. Besides simply reading the sentences, which is mostly passive, you also have to analyze what's happening in the plot, what might happen next, and what particular themes and points the author is trying to explore. Reading a "good" book is very interactive.
Same could be said for music, but to a lesser extent - I can listen to music while I drive, but I can't read a book while I drive ^.^
TV and movies are as passive as you get, even with the really "deep" stuff. And lumping the other three in with TV is just bad. And I'm pretty sure the "burning hatred of humanity" was a joke on the parent poster's on introvertedness.
DATABASE WOW WOW
What you've just done is the single most common error in any correlational study. Let's go through some remedial Statistics here.
Correlation coefficient {r} = [1/(n-1)][summation of((x-(mean of x))/(st.dev.x))((y-(mean of y))/(st.dev.y))]
Do you see "cause" or "effect" or "connect the dots" in that equation? No? Well, there's a good reason. The sole function of a correlation study is to find a relationship. Not a causal relationship. A relationship. When X goes up, Y goes up too, on average. When Z decreases, H increases, on average. X does not cause Y to increase. Z does not cause H to increase.
A few years back there was a study on cavities and reading level. Huge headlines! Kids with higher reading levels have more cavities! Connect the dots, right? Higher reading levels means more time spent reading, which means they're sitting around, eating candy, getting cavities, right? Or maybe the brain releases a chemical when you read better that breaks down your teeth, right? There's no question that having a higher reading level CAUSES the cavities, right?
Turns out that kids with higher reading levels are older than the other kids. Turns out that as you get older, you have more cavities, on average, than you did when you were younger. Turns out that the study forgot to take age into account.
There is absolutely no way to prove that more time spent on video games causes lower grades. Correlation != causation.
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
I don't know about you, but I did the same thing and almost failed out of many of my classes. Sure, I learned a lot from hacking, tinkering, and reading my way through High School and Middle School; but curiously enough, none of it counted as completed homework assignments. It certainly didn't earn me any sympathy from the teachers who's classes I was falling asleep in during the day. Pre-college education is about conformity more than about learning. (Take the top 10 graduates from any high-school class, and there is a good chance that as many as five of them are completely unqualified to do anything but earn the high-score in the trivia game at their local bar.) Any independant activity that distracts you from the pre-canned assignments is going to have a negative effect on your grades regardless of whether it is productive or not.
You say it "certainly would have" improved your grades. Well, did it?
What do you think adults are going to just suddenly wake up, have self control, and make good decisions. What an excellent opportunity to teach kids the consequences of their actions. By all means don't let them run wild, but silly rules like this make for one hell of a rebellious teenager when they realise the rules you've made up are arbitrary and pointless. Try getting them interested in other things instead of just the computer game so that even if they do have a bit of a run with a game, they are aware there's other fun things to do with your spare time that also happen to be excellent learning experiences. Spend some time with the kid too if you want to be able to shape anything they do.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Even ones not designed to be. Ok shooters not so much, they train reflexes and such but that's about it. However strategy games ARE educational. They teach a skill that I think is useful:
Analyzing a system. If you want to get good at a strategy game vs a computer, you do so by really understanding the system. You learn the rules, you figure out ways the can be manipulated to your favour, you figure out how to win by being superior at the system. It's something that I'm fairly good at and serves me well on tests. They too are a game with rules and if you can figure them out, you can do much better. I am (or perhaps I should say was since I'm not in school any more) rather good at that. I take a test and figure out plenty about it, I do better on that one, and much better on subsequent ones. I'm not just taking it, I'm analyzing the system. I figure out what kinds of questions are likely to be asked, if there are any tells in the answers (in the case of multiple choice tests), if questions interrelate and information from one can give you the answer to another.
Now, while I can't present any evidence of how I gained this skill, I can say that the same methods I apply to tests I apply to games like Civ 4. It's the same deal, I am analyzing the game mechanics, and how the computers react to what I do. I am not trying to come up with a list of "they do this so I do that" limited strategies, I am trying to gain a good understanding of the whole system so I can deal with anything. Maybe video games didn't give me that skill, but they probably helped hone it.
What you have to accept is that not everything in a child's life can or should be education focused. Especially since another valuable skill is learning how to learn from life. Everything in life can be a learning experience and it's valuable to take something you learned for no reason at all, and find an application to another part of life. Learning could and should be fun and a continuous experience, not something you have to go and so something special for.
Also kids need time to be kids. There's plenty of time to be grown up and responsible later and part of becoming a happy functioning human being is learning how to have fun, and to do so in moderation with work. I know far too many people who live for nothing but their jobs and it leads to things like depression, excessive drinking, and so on because they never learned how to fill the hours when they aren't being forced to do something. Really, it's ok for kids to just plain goof off at times, it will not cripple them for life.
Finally I think there's waaaay too much focus on grades. While it's important for a kid to do well in school, there seems to be too many parents worried that they need to get A's in all their classes. Fuck that, often grades and learning do not go hand in hand. Filling your head full of facts so you can get 100% on a test, only to then forget them is useless. However actually learning and understanding as many of the concepts and applications as you can, even if that only translates to an 85% on the test, is much better. That's something you might use in life.
You should be active in your kid's education and help them to learn things that will last a lifetime. So long as they are learning, trying, and are getting grades good enough to succeed don't sweat it. If they wind up with a B, or even C instead of an A, oh well. The important thing is they learned what they could that will last. Those are the kind of people I hire. I'm not interested in someone with a 4.0 that only knows how to cram themselves full of facts and formulas to pass a test. Ok, you are full of facts. Wonderful, so is my computer and it's much better at it. What I need is someone who can learn concepts and apply them to real problems.
Is it really the video games that's the problem, or just the lack of studies?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The conclusion of this study should have been that kids who routinely play computer games perceive they're doing worse in school than those who don't.
The Publication
This study is also subject to several limitations. We used a self-report measure of school performance as our main outcome. Use of self-report for school performance is supported by previous studies showing that, whereas students may inflate their grades,14, 38 self-reports generally correlate with teacher reports. Specifically, Anderson et al14 reported that whereas self-reported grades were inflated from 0.26 to 0.37 points on a 4-point scale, they were highly correlated with transcript grades (r = 0.71-0.82). Hence, we believe that despite the probable grade inflation, the substantial and statistically significant correlative associations between the self-reported grades and all of the covariates are internally valid. The study was conducted in a limited geographic area, so it is possible that the findings may not hold true for children in other areas of the country. A national sample would be needed to determine whether the relationships between media use and school performance apply across populations, especially among minority populations. In addition, it is always possible that there are other unmeasured confounders that would explain the association between television exposure and school performance. Notably, our study did not include any measure of child intelligence quotient. It is possible that children with low intelligence quotient perform more poorly in school and, as a result, have less interest in school and greater interest in television, movie, and video game use. Finally, whereas we have established a relationship between exposure to adult content in television and movies and poorer school performance, because of our cross-sectional design, we cannot infer a before-and-after relationship between content exposure and school performance. Additional work is needed to clarify directionality, along with the intervening processes between adult content exposure and school performance. A longitudinal study, with data on potential mediators, as well as school performance, could be helpful in studying this relationship.
The authors themselves do a better job of critiquing their work than you do. With a correlation coefficient on self-reporting of grades this high, I am confident in kids' abilities to assess their own performance. Of course, I'm happy to be impartial. I'm not sure any piece of information would be sufficient to reverse your clearly strong beliefs (based on anecdotal evidence).
The conclusion they draw is correct, which is that more research should be done which controls for other factors. To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if the results were even more conclusive if they did this.
(r = 0.71-0.82)
And what is the probability of achieving those r-values by chance? If you do not know that, you have no basis other than faith for any belief about its significance.
The state of statisitical practice in the social sciences is shameful. To simply say that an r-value of "0.71-0.82" is "high" is completely and utterly meaningless. I have seen experiments where an r-value of 0.98 is "low" and 0.998 is "high". The meaning of "low" and "high" for r is entirely dependent on the distributions of the underlying data, which is why a) no one ever gives a p-value for it and b) it is a terrible measure of association that ought never to be used.
If a reseacher publishes an analysis that does not include a p-value (extra credit for Bonforoni correction) the paper is not worth reading and the author ought to be publically laughed at and/or sent off to a political re-education camp until they learn that probability is meaningful and everything else is just wanking.
Ergo, these guys have done an inadequate analysis, and they have further made an assumption of homogeneity that is according to their own conclusions incorrect. That is, they claim that "all students over-report equally" when it comes to academic scores, and they then claim that their study population is inhomogenous with respect to one of the variables measured. This purported difference trivially invalidates their use of a measure of association that assumes all students over-report equally.
What they are saying is, "If we assume all students over-report equally, we find a difference between them."
Ergo, perhaps the assumption of equal over-reporting is false, and they have found this because they have sliced the population in a manner that is different from previous studies on self-reported grades. Every large population contains many significantly different sub-populations. Maybe they have found one. This is as legitimate a conclusion as any other, and in particular, perhaps gamers have a better ability to evaluate their actual performance due to the feedback they get from playing games.
That is at least as legitimate a conclusion as any other.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
It is different if it is not compulsory, so it depends on what X and Y are. If X is "clean up your room" and Y is "and we'll let you out of your room," then what you say applies. If X is "help me shovel out the septic tank" and Y is "and you'll get an ice cream sundae after dinner," then you are reward-based and perhaps that sundae isn't quite worth the effort you need to go through to get it.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?