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Not surprisingly, with all that game playing going on, the authors find that the voucher program actually resulted in a decline in grades This is a little surp
by jcl 17y ago
Not surprisingly, with all that game playing going on, the authors find that the voucher program actually resulted in a decline in grades
This is a little surprising, actually. The study showed the amount of homework done is pretty much constant across both groups, and I'd expect that to be the main influence on grades, not what they do in their leisure time. One has to wonder what the non-game-playing students were doing in their spare time that increased their grades, or what aspect of the games is hurting grades.
- JeffJenkins 17y agoI believe that graph is about the time spent on the computer doing homework, so it's possible the increased computer game playing took away from non-computer homework.
- jcl 17y agoI took a look at the paper, and that is not an unreasonable explanation... It seems that the increased computer use did indeed reduce the time spent doing non-computer homework a bit, although the data is quite noisy and may not be statistically significant; TV viewing was similarly impacted. But what really took a hit was time spent reading recreationally. I can't help wonder what influence the reading had on grades relative to the homework. Another thing in the paper that I found somewhat surprising was that slightly different parental rules had markedly different effects: Interestingly, we find evidence that the presence of parental rules regarding homework mitigate some of the negative effects of winning a computer voucher without affecting the gains to computer skills and cognitive ability. On the other hand, the presence of rules regarding computer use reduce the positive impacts on computer skills without improving academic achievement. http://www.columbia.edu/~cp2124/papers/computer.pdf http://www.columbia.edu/~cp2124/papers/computer.pdf
- sophacles 17y agoAlso, there is a disturbing bit on the labels of the graphs: the word everyday. Even if I used my computer for homework a lot, it is feasible I don't have homework to do everyday, but there are always games....