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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
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.
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.
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.
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.