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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."
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.
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.
This sounds just like me. I breezed through k-12 hardly cracking a book (well school book anyway.) I was a voracious reader starting around age six. I honestly think any kid who spends more than 30 minutes a day reading just about anything will do fine until they hit college.
Once I hit the University level though I was totally unprepared. Almost flunked out during my first year while I figured out how to study. It's not about how you spend your free time, it's about meeting your responsibilities first. I'm sure would have done much better all the way through had I been monitored more closely.
Politicians are like diapers - they should be changed frequently and for the same reasons.
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.