I 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-

I 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