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Children Using Technology Have Better Literacy Skills
eldavojohn writes "A UK study of three thousand children aged nine to sixteen suggests something that may not come as a shock to geeks: using technology increases a child's core literary skills. As Researcher Obvious put it, 'The more forms of communications children use the stronger their core literary skills.' And for those of us worried about a world of 'tl;dr' and 'Y U H8n?' the research claims that 'text speech' does not damage literacy. The biggest shortcoming of this research is that it appears the children graded their own writing in that their methodology was an online survey designed to ask the children which technology they use and then follow up with asking them how well they write to determine which children have better literacy skills."
I can say I'm amazing at intercourse, but it doesn't make it so.
There is also a correlation between wealth and access to technology. And a correlation between wealth and literacy.
Neither the BBC article nor the researchers make this claim. They just say that it is correlated with better literacy.
An online survey isn't science, (If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane). The summary itself exposes the falacy right out ("...may not come as a shock to geeks"). The geeks are the ones more likely to be filling out an online survey in the first place. Not to mention the obvious class differences between those who have ready access to lots of technology vs those who don't and what that implies about their neighborhoods and schools. There's all kinds of variables that arent being controlled for.
Reading ability also increases with shoe size.
rofl omg i been usin tech 4 a looooooong time since i wuz a kid now i read good but my boss tellz me not to send emails and memos nemore cuz no1 can read em lol!!!1
I no. this story iz so tru. i c ug apps 4 my college that luk lik this. way smart
This is not merely a shortcoming, it is a devastating hole that renders the study utterly useless. This has to be about the dumbest survey I've ever heard of. No conclusions can be drawn from a self-assessment of ones own ability. Other research has shown a correlation between lack of ability and overestimation of ability in self-assessment.
The biggest shortcoming of this research is that it appears the children graded their own writing in that their methodology was an online survey designed to ask the children which technology they use and then follow up with asking them how well they write to determine which children have better literacy skills
So, really, the only conclusion we can draw from this is that 'the more technology one uses, the better they think their literacy is." Great.
I've noticed that since being online my spelling has improved tremendously. As a kid growing up I always had much difficulty with spelling/grammar, but in a world of red squiggly lines misspelled words become hard to ignore. I know most people say that spell check ruins people's ability to spell, however I'd argue the opposite.
I had a period of time between school and the rise of blogging where I didn't write as much. And I guess my writing skills languished. I think they've improved now. I probably dont write long essays or papers as well because I haven't been doing that in a long time.
Of the children who neither blogged nor used social network sites, 47% rated their writing as "good" or "very good", while 61% of the bloggers and 56% of the social networkers said the same.
It is baffling as to why anyone even bothered running this survey. Even if we assume that these kids are not intentionally lying, studies have shown that people generally tend to rate themselves as above average. To paraphrase these studies:
Idiots do not realize they are stupid. (If you don't know there are 2 homophones of "there," then you won't know if you're using it wrong.)
Exceptionally intelligent types underestimate how much smarter they are than Joe-average ("I can't be the only one who thought that was easy")
And Joe-average tends to think he's Joe-average+1. (No one wants to be average.)
using technology increases a child's core literary skills. As Researcher Obvious put it, 'The more forms of communications children use the stronger their core literary skills.' And for those of us worried about a world of 'tl;dr' and 'Y U H8n?'
I don't know about literary skills, but I see an abundance of wrong spellings of words that don't have the right meaning but phonetically are almost the same. An example is 'of' instead of 'have'. E.g. someone may write "he would of done this" instead of "he would have done this". Probably caused by trying to write too fast and not thinking about what they wrote, and that's a phenomenon that I've only seen the last 4 years or so (I think I first spotted this in a subtitle for Torchwood. I almost couldn't believe my eyes, that such a mistake was made by the BBC). If that time estimate is correct for when this sort of thing started, then possibly technology, or probably better the entire lifestyle (fast paced, short attention span, exacerbated by TV's ads that interrupt programs) in the west these days, may be the cause of this.
...furthermore, if the survey was something like this: :) - and most of that... can I say "crap"? comes from teenagers. Amazingly enough, this metalanguage has no secrets to them, but my petty attempts to understand them and respond back to them in the same style only amuses them.
"Do you enjoy writing? Click on the appropriate checkmark: [ ]Yes | [ ]No"
then all I can say is... "d00d, wtf".
I self-taught to be so attentive when writing and always try to be as exact as possible (although English is not my native language). It's a matter of pride, I confess, but it helped me a lot in the past. My native language contains special characters (îâ) which are used by maybe 1-2% of people while writing on the Internet, mainly because localized keyboards are hard to find and unappealing to most. Even I don't use a localized keyboard but use the OS-defined layout for my native language as default. learning it was pretty difficult, because back when I made contact with computers localization was unavailable. So after years of using English alphabet it was a pain to switch. Nevertheless, I pulled it off and now I'm proficient (albeit not very fast) in writing correctly in both English and my native language.
Why do I say that here? Well, I'm having difficulties understanding what some people write to me; they're using mangled words, numbers instead of letters, and even if in most mild cases of language mutilation I can get what they mean, the more extreme cases leave me perplexed. "I dn knw i r b @ hom 2morw" made no sense to me until properly translated
So please allow me to say that I seriously doubt this "study".
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Study finds that toddlers who spend all their time on slashdot are much smarter than the average toddler. Well I knew that.
Incidentally, you have a number in your handle. I assume 4 is suppose to mean 'for'? :-)
There are statistical techniques to analyze the contribution of multiple variables to a result, and social scientists routinely use these techniques to control for confounding factors like wealth.
For example, a typical study on something racism will claim something like, say, that after controlling for wealth and education, black people get worse deals on mortages; that is, the study will use statistical techniques to isolate the contribution of the three variables (race, wealth and education). A typical dumbass that doesn't like the conclusion of the study, however, will claim that the study is invalid because blacks are poorer and less educated than whites, and poorer people get worse mortgage deals. Which is, of course, a strawman, because the statistical techniques used in these studies are normally designed to compare people who have similar wealth and education but different race.
I certainly can't vouch for the study that's mentioned in this article, but I somehow doubt that you're any more ready to vouch against it.
Are you adequate?
"Most of the others are complaining about the fact that the results are self-selected."
Is that really a fact? I pointed out in another post that the survey was not intended to measure literacy. Reading the abstract again I also doubt they were self selecting. Here is the relevant quote with highlights...
The key objectives of this survey were therefore: to explore how much young people enjoy writing, what type of writing they engage in, how good at writing they think they are, what they think about writing and what the role of technology is in young people's writing. This report outlines the findings from 3001 pupils aged 9-16 from England and Scotland, who completed an online survey in May 2009.
Now someone might want to dig into the pdf report and contradict me but the word "pupils" seems to indicate they were asked to fill this out in class time, ie: not self selected.
I know that it's geek herasy not to burn social scientists at the stake but I'm a bit of a softy.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.