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."
I sense a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of students suddenly cried out in terror and then were suddenly silenced...
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.
Fair enough, but it's equal time for equap pay. You know what that means, parents. No TV for you on work nights.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
You really can't make generalizations about children when it comes to things like this. Different children develop differently, and generalizations become too broad to be useful applications. But here are the rules for my kids. The homework is done first. After that they get a modest amount of playtime. We check the homework, if the homework is done well then the kids deserve a little playtime.
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
I spent insane amounts of hours EVERY weekday playing starcraft/red alert/whatever else was out at the time, and my grades were-- Ok, i see your point.
Stop! Enough said.
I am in grade 10. I use my computer all night, and will sometimes play games (or read wikipedia! Great passtime.). Every day of the week. My average last year sat at around 87%. I cannot stress enough that the same thing is not always true for everyone. Some people would never do a good job on their homework if they sat around watching TV or playing games all the time, for others it works fine. Also, moderation is key. You need to know when to say "enough playing games, time to get homework done". Of course, for some people, it's best to do homework first, but I never do that! ;)
Also, some people have suggested time spent playing video games could instead be spent studying. In practise, everyone seems to do the bare minimum and never studies if it's not required.
s.clementmonkey@sympatico.ca, remove the 'monkey'.
The conclusion may be true, but parents need to be careful how they define "playing video games". Much of my childhoot computer recreation time was spent programming for fun. Often testing games that I had programmed. That would certainly have IMPROVED my grades.
Well I guess when space invaders attack earth I won't be able to help..
:(
Too bad.. I had my shasta and all rush mix tape ready to go
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.
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.
[End of Line]
Willy: It's impossible for me to fire a pistol. If you'll check me medical records, you'll see I have a cripplin' arthritis in me index fingerrrs. Look at 'em! (holds fingers up) I got it from "Space Invaders" in 1977.
Wiggum: Aw, yeah. That was a pretty addictive video game.
Willy: (surprised) Video game?
...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!
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?
The Robber's Cave Study was performed by Muzafer and Carolyn Sharif, not the Iman Sharif who did this study.
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 problem with moderation is PARENTS don't know how to say stop. As long as their kid is in front of the TV and not bothering them, they just let them play. Out of sight, out of mind.
I use games as a motivation for my son. The general rule is no games during the weekday, but if he does really well, or I get him to do all his homework plus some extra studying, he gets 30min of play(notice I did not say 1hr). I also use this tactic on weekends. Study 30min = 1hr game play with me.
He gets excited about doing homework so he can play multi-player games with Dad.
Problem is, most parents don't know how to handle this, and they don't know what buttons to push to motivate their kids.
As Mark Twain said "Figures don't lie, but liars figure." Statistics are easily pressganged. The real question here is causation: Why believe that vidgames cause low marks when low marks might just as easily cause [frustration] vid.games? Most likely, a third cause [independance] affects both to a very limited extent.
I found the only major adjustment I had to make in my lifestyle in college was changing my major to Business. Once I did that I could behave as badly as I did in high school. (worse in my case, as the lack of parental supervision allowed me to do horrible things)
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .