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Media Use, Scholastic Achievement, and Attention Span

George Comstock

Media and Scholastic Achievement: Key Questions

The influence of mass media on the scholastic achievement of children and teenagers has been of prominent concern since the introduction of television in the 1940s (Schramm, Lyle, & Parker, 1961). Might television or other media in some way interfere with how well young people are performing on standardized tests as well as in school? Early empirically-based analyses emphasized the particular fit between characteristics of the young person and the amount and kind of media use (Schramm et al., 1961); seventy years later, the same prescription remains valid. What the young person brings to the medium – motive, attitude, cognitive ability – remains as important as what the medium – content, style, message – brings to the young person. The situational and evidentiary differences, however, are enormous. Two questions have remained paramount:

1 What does media use imply for scholastic performance and the cognitive and behavioral skills on which it rests?

2 Where there are positive or negative associations between media use and a measure of scholastic achievement – such as grades or test scores – what are the explanatory mechanisms and processes?

These seemingly straightforward questions about the allocation of free time have become increasingly perplexing to answer. The variety, availability, and use of media have all increased, and there is now a much broader array of data on which to base conclusions. The media environment has been changing swiftly, with new platforms and portals, increased availability of media in homes, and in particular in the bedrooms of the young, and increases in the amount of time spent with media (Rideout, Foehr, & Roberts, 2010; Roberts & Foehr, 2004). It also is not clear that the criterion measure – the particular test or score (such as grades) chosen to reflect achievement – employed in some prominent studies has been sensitive to the media influence it was intended to capture. In addition, there is the suggestion in recent data that at least one long-standing pattern is dissolving.

Preeminence of Television

The stunning rise of newer media, in the public eye, has somewhat displaced the forest in favor of certain trees. Interpersonal and social applications of the Internet with their popularity and promise of profit-making understandably receive endless chronicling in the news media. Technological developments and the transient rise of new media “stars” – blogs, personalities, videoclips – entrance the public. Yet, extensive, reliable data warn that the emphasis on newer media may lead to a false impression of actual audience behavior and the media landscape.

Television easily remains the most-used medium among the young as well as those older. Estimated average daily viewing of television and related screen media by young persons of 4 hours 29 minutes dwarfs use of other media (Rideout et al., 2010). The figure for “live TV” (programming viewed on a TV set as it is telecast) is 2 hours 39 minutes; the remaining 1 hour and 50 minutes comes from recordings, videos, and other archival platforms.

The data not only record impressive use of television in both absolute (hours and minutes) and relative (proportions of media time and leisure) terms. They also record that the displacement of television in the expenditure of time by young persons has had a firmer basis in expectation and speculation than reality. Rideout, Foehr, and Roberts (2010) estimate media consumption across a 10-year period, from 1999 to 2009, using large, nationally representative samples of 8- to 18-year-olds (Table 28.1). Computer and Internet use as well as media consumption in total all increase substantially, as would be expected from news media accounts. However, contrary to much in the news, consumption of television and related screen media also increase. This unlikely outcome – because time is unhappily finite – has been made possible by an increase in the use of two (or more) media at the same time and use of newer, more convenient platforms. As a result, displacement of the older medium of television has been confounded.

Table 28.1 Media exposure and use over a decade: 1999–2009 (8- to 18-year-olds, hours: minutes)

Television and Achievement

In repeated instances since the introduction of the medium, amount of television viewing has been recorded as negatively associated with scholastic achievement, and consumption of television remains prodigious among the young. The daily averages of more than 7 hours 30 minutes devoted to using media and 10 hours 45 minutes of exposure to various media a day among those 8- to 18-year-olds recorded by Rideout and colleagues (2010) include about 4 hours 30 minutes of exposure to television content.

There are six major sources – none of which by itself could be ignored – that together are compelling because of the size of samples, the diversity of subject matter, the range of grades, span of time covered, and the consistency of outcomes. They are:

1 The 1980 California Assessment Program (CAP) data, which include more than 500,000 fifth and twelfth graders.

2 The 1980 High School and Beyond (HSB) data collected by the National Center for Educational Statistics (Keith, Reimers, Fehrmann, Pottebaum, & Aubey, 1986), which cover more than 28,000 seniors.

3 The 1983–84 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data collected by the Educational Testing Service (Anderson, Mead, & Sullivan, 1986), which include about 70,000 in three grades across the United States.

4 The pooling of data from eight statewide assessments by Susan Neuman (1988) that essentially replicates the CAP inquiry in seven additional states, and represents several million pupils.

5 The meta-analysis by Micha Razel (2001) that includes about 1 million pupils in elementary, intermediate, and high school, with a sizable number from several dozen foreign countries as well as more recent NAEP US data from the 1990s.

6 The analysis by Nary Shin (2004) of children age 6 to 13 in about 1,200 families drawn from the 1997 Child Development Supplement to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID).

These large data sets concur in recording that lower achievement has been associated with greater amounts of television viewing. The emphasis has been on reading and mathematics, but this negative relationship holds for every subject for which data has been obtained, including science and social studies and a thorough representation of the three basic skills of reading, writing, and mathematics. The negative relationship also held for a wide range of grades (in these data, from the fourth through the twelfth), represents more than three dozen countries and covers almost two decades (from 1980 to the mid-1990s).

The CAP data (see Figure 28.1) provide an excellent example because they cover the three basic skills, include two grades distant enough from one another to leave little doubt that the relationship is widespread, and rely on a census (rather than a sampling) of everyone attending school on the day of testing (282,000 in the sixth grade and 227,000 in the twelfth grade). CAP follow-ups in 1982 and 1986 document the same inverse relationship for social studies and science.

Figure 28.1 Survey of sixth grade achievement and television viewing habits, California Assessment Program (1980). Reprinted by permission from California Department of Education, CDE Press, 1430 N. Street, Suite 3207, Sacramento, CA 95814.

Those who viewed the most and recorded the lowest achievement scores were substantial in number, accounting for about one-fifth of the CAP sixth graders. Nevertheless, there are several important caveats:

1 Household socioeconomic status (SES) is positively associated with achievement, and this relationship is far stronger than the negative associations between viewing and achievement.

2 As household SES increases, the negative association becomes more pronounced (for example, for those whose head is classified as “professional”, the curve is noticeably steeper than for those whose head is classified as “semi-professional”) but the proportion who view the most and register the lowest scores remains substantial (about 15% among those “professional” and “semi-professional”).

3 The inverse association is somewhat more pronounced in the twelfth than in the sixth grade.

These data suggest a particular kind of substitution or displacement in which a scholastically less-valuable experience (television) takes the place of more valuable experiences (other media, other activities) because the former is more enjoyable. Viewing television is apparently more costly in terms of achievement as the value of alternatives (as indexed by SES) increases. It is also apparently more costly when school is more demanding, as exemplified by the steeper decline in the twelfth grade.

The proposed relationship is readily testable by Gaddy's (1986) analysis of the HSB data. At issue was the role of the availability in the home of educational resources such as an encyclopedia, books, newspapers, and magazines (and were the data being collected today, presumably computer and Internet access, which would be more often available in upper SES households). A sample of about 10,000 from whom data were obtained when they were high school sophomores and seniors, confirms that resources in the home are part of the relationship (Gaddy, 1986). As Table 28.2 shows, the inverse association – over four measures of achievement: vocabulary, reading, mathematics, and grades – was consistently stronger when resources were more plentiful.

This pattern, in which the association between viewing and achievement depends at least in part on the character of foregone opportunities, has led Comstock and Scharrer (1999) to offer a tentative hypothesis:

These data obviously do not establish a causal relationship between viewing television and poorer scholastic performance. What they do establish unambiguously is an inverse association at the time of their collection between viewing and achievement.

Table 28.2 Educational resources and achievement

The task is to explain this relationship. There is no convenient single study or recognized group of related studies that undertakes this mission. The remaining strategy, imperfect but unavoidable, is to pursue the several lines of separate inquiry that variously address this question and construct the most plausible answer.

Vanishing Relationship

Three analyses seemingly result in the disappearance of the negative relationship between the amount of viewing and achievement. Understandably, this vanishing is sometimes emphasized by reviewers (Schmidt & Vandewater, 2008). However, these three analyses, uniformly excellent at what they attempt to accomplish, do not address the central question of everyday television viewing and everyday school performance.

Gaddy (1986), using a sample of about 10,000 from the HSB data, examines the relationship between sophomore viewing and achievement – as measured by grades – in the senior year. The focus is on shifts in achievement over this two-year period. Initially, the association is negative. However, after controlling for a wide array of possible influences, the inverse association disappeared.

The problem, from the present perspective, is threefold. First, some of the control factors are likely to serve as the means by which television would influence achievement; for example, prior grades and educational resources in the home, both of which might have been suppressed by television use. Second, change in achievement between the sophomore and senior years is a rather insensitive outcome (as so many students discover who would like to improve their grade point averages over the last two years of high school or college). Third, the longitudinal panel design ignores contemporary viewing, and individual viewing varies too much over such a three-year period for the sophomore measure to serve as a proxy for later years (Tangney & Feshbach, 1988). As a result, the analysis fails to address the issue of the relationship between viewing and achievement.

Gortmaker, Salter, Walker, and Dietz (1990), drawing on a nationally representative sample of 1,745 children from the National Health Examination (NHE) survey, analyze the relationships between television viewing and scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), the Wide Range Achievement Test in Arithmetic (WRAT-A), and in Reading (WRAT-R) over a four-year period. Again, after controlling for a wide array of possible influences, an initial negative correlation disappeared. From the present perspective, the problem is that when the earlier test score is entered as a control variable (as is the case here) the possibility of recording a change attributable to television – or anything else – is minimal. This is particularly the case with the WISC, which is intended to measure a trait and would confound expectations if it did not display stability over time.

Gentzkow and Shapiro (2008), similarly making use of an available body of valuable data (in this case, the 1965 national survey of achievement conducted by the sociologist James Coleman to assess the effects of racial segregation in public education), examined the relationships between test scores for five types of achievement in high school (math, spatial reasoning, verbal, reading, and general knowledge) and exposure to television in the preschool years. They were able to do this because of the television station-licensing freeze imposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), beginning in the late 1940s to reexamine issues of spectrum assignment, which created community-level variation in access to the new medium. The analysis, drawing on the test scores of about 350,000 students, concluded that there was no negative causal contribution of earlier television to achievement those many years later, and that any effects probably were positive – and especially so for those from homes with fewer educational resources or where English was not the first language. The problem, from the present perspective, is that the analysis is confined to preschool access to the medium and adolescent achievement more than a decade later and does not examine contemporaneous adolescent viewing and achievement.

Curvilinearity

The question of curvilinearity is often justifiably raised because quite a few analyses report that achievement rises with increasing viewing before turning downwards (Fetler, 1984; S. Neuman, 1988, 1991; Potter, 1987; Razel, 2001; Williams, Haertel, Walberg, & Haertel, 1982). Yet, a glance at the massive – and thereby hard to discard – CAP data for the sixth grade (again, see Figure 28.1) reveals only the scantest sign of curvilinearity.

Figure 28.2 Achievement as a function of viewing time averaged over age. Reproduced with permission from M. Razel (2001). The complex model of television viewing and educational achievement. Journal of Education Research, 94(6), 371–379.

Examination of the various sets of data discloses an interpretable pattern. In all instances, most of the curve is negative. When curvilinearity occurs (achievement scores rising with increasing viewing before descending), it is confined to the very early portion of the curve. An excellent example based on one million students is provided by the meta-analysis of six large-scale studies by Razel (2001; see Figure 28.2). Most of the slope is dramatically downward. And when curvilinearity does occur it is in the earlier grades. When high school and elementary school samples from the same study are compared, curvilinearity is largely confined to the younger ages. Again, Razel provides a graphic example (see Figure 28.3).

Curvilinearity, then, has been neither universal nor pronounced. It is a property of those younger; even then it is confined to the initiation of the curve, and is modest in magnitude. The data, in addition to indicating that viewing largely has been associated with lower achievement, also warn that television's role (and by reasonable extension, that of other media) may be quite sensitive to age.

Attention

One plausible explanation for a negative contribution by television viewing to achievement is that the undemanding pleasures of viewing interfere with the subsequent ability or willingness to pay attention in a classroom setting or focus on a task. This outcome has variously been labeled an attention deficit (which would be distinct from and less severe than the clinical diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD; Schmidt & Vanderwater, 2008), impulsivity (Shin, 2004), or – in a useful if perhaps uninformative catch phrase – an “intolerance for schooling” (Hornik, 1981).

Figure 28.3 Achievement as a function of viewing time at different ages. Reproduced with permission from M. Razel (2001). The complex model of television viewing and educational achievement. Journal of Education Research, 94(6), 371–379.

The pattern discernible in the data, which are confined to the viewing of young children, although certainly lacking the massive unanimity of the evidence on television and achievement, has three features (Anderson & McGuire, 1978; Desmond, Singer, & Singer, 1990i Geist & Gibson, 2000; Johnson, Cohen, Kasen, & Brook, 2007; Landius, Poulton, Welche, & Hancox, 2007; Salomon, 1979; Singer, Singer, Desmond, Hirsch, & Nicol, 1988; Singer, Singer, & Rapaczynski, 1984; Zimmerman & Christakis, 2007):

• The viewing of children's educational programs by those of the ages for which the program was designed typically has not been associated with a decrease in measures of subsequent attention.
• The viewing of entertainment programs sometimes has been associated with decreases in measures of subsequent attention, and the viewing of violent programs in particular consistently has been associated with decreases in those measures.
• The viewing of television entertainment at an earlier age has often been associated with lower scores in later years on measures of attention, and this longitudinal relationship holds for all ages, including those who were adolescents as well as those who were of preschool age at the time of later measurement.

The evidence is largely correlational, but there are usually statistical controls for critical variables such as household SES. There also are experimental designs that unequivocally demonstrate contemporaneous causation for their particular circumstances. Two good examples are Geist and Gibson (2000) and Schmidt, Pempek, Kirkorian, Lund, and Anderson (2008), which together encompass distinctly different television stimuli and ages. In Geist and Gibson, the outcome measures were attention to and time spent on a task. About 60 fourth and fifth grade children were randomly assigned to three groups – no television, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, or The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Those who viewed the Power Rangers gave less attention to and spent less time on the task than the other two groups, which did not significantly differ on these measures. In Schmidt and colleagues, the outcome measure is similar – attention to and length of time engaged in play. However, the children were toddlers and preschoolers (12-, 24-, and 36-months-old) and the stimulus was background television displaying an adult game show. Although the children did not spend much time looking at the screen, play was disrupted to a small degree by the operating television set. The inference is the same in both cases: television (violent in one, irrelevant in the other) adversely affected attention and persistence.

These analyses address the question of whether the attentional effects apparently attributable to television achieve the threshold of a clinical diagnosis of ADHD. Christakis, Zimmerman, DiGiuseppe, and McCarthy (2004) using large samples (1,278 one-year-olds and 1,345 three-year-olds) drawn from a nationally representative data base, found that parental estimates of viewing at ages one and three predicted scores representing attentional deficits at age seven. Stevens and Muslow (2006), using a similarly large, representative sample, found no such link between television viewing at kindergarten age and ADHD at first grade age. Obel and colleagues (2004) in a much smaller Danish sample similarly found no link between viewing at age 3 years 6 months and ages 10 to 11. A key factor is whether the Christakis and colleagues analysis reflects ADHD. The claim by Stevens and Muslow that their labeling of symtomology is far too generous is quite telling – but doesn't erase the deficits in attention they found. The most reasonable conclusion is to harbor ADHD as a function of viewing with considerable skepticism (but not dismissal) while accepting the more widely supported pattern of interference in both the short- and long-runs with attention and persistence as consequences of television exposure.

Language and Vocabulary

There is hardly any doubt that television disseminates words and phrases as attested to by the widespread familiarity by persons of all ages with advertising slogans. Schramm, Lyle, and Parker (1961) convincingly documented this phenomenon in their large-scale study of the effects on children of the introduction of television. Those in communities with television were about a year advanced in vocabulary compared to those in communities yet to receive the medium. However, three decades later, Williams (1986) and colleagues were surprised to find no signs of vocabulary gains in a remote community newly receiving television. Their choice of instruments was impeccable – the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT), the vocabulary subtest of the Stanford-Binet (S-B), and the vocabulary subscale of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC). Each was a recognized, widely used measure. Not one registered an increase attributable to the arrival of television.

The explanation almost certainly rests in part with the focus and initial purpose of the tests and in part with changes in the media environment. These tests by design measure general vocabulary, and thus would exclude the words and phrases most likely to be newly brought to the community by television – the glossaries of news, sports, entertainment, and advertising. In addition, by this time (the 1980s) television was so commonplace that words and phrases introduced by the medium would be disseminated to non-viewers and infrequent viewers by word of mouth.

There nevertheless remains the power of television to teach new words and phrases directly when the medium purposefully introduces them to receptive audiences, as happens with children in the case of educational programs and just about everybody in the case of advertising. Many studies attest to this success (Linebarger & Walker, 2005; Rice, 1990; Rice, Buhr, & Otting, 1992; Rice, Huston, Truglio, & Wright, 1990; Rice, Oetting, Marquis, Bode, & Pae, 1994). However, Naigles and Mayeux (2001) in their review make the important distinction between lexical development (words) and grammatical development (rules). Educational television can present words clearly, repeatedly, and consistently in regard to usage, all effective devices to enhance learning. The teaching of grammar, as Naigles and Mayeux argue, in contrast is more dependent on interaction with a parent or caregiver and the consequent reinforcement of correct responses, and thus there is no comparable research record of media effectiveness.

The manner and content of presentation certainly matters. Linebarger and Walker (2005) compared vocabulary acquisition for very young children (age two-and-a-half) and found measurable differences for various educational programs, with Blue's Clues and Dora the Explorer in this instance having greater impact than Sesame Street. It also must be acknowledged that children from lower SES households are particularly likely to rely on television for exposure to stimuli related to language. For example, Neuman and Celano (2001) in comparing middle class and low-income neighborhoods found the latter starkly sparser in circumstances that would promote reading (including such prosaic aspects as signage, children's and young-adult books for sale, and places conducive to reading) and Jordan (2005) in a small sample of low-income children found that they did not differ much (Rideout, Vandewater, & Wartella, 2003) in the regularity of being read to but that the amount of time spent on this activity was much less and television viewing was much greater, reaching about six hours a day on weekends.

Television, then, is an accomplished teacher of vocabulary under certain conditions. When television was introduced, access to an operating set equaled those conditions – new words and a naïve audience. They remain in place among children viewing educational programs. Children – and the population in general – have enhanced vocabularies as a consequence of the presence of television, but exposure itself (as was the case in the data of Schramm and colleagues) is no longer a necessary condition (as Williams and colleagues document).

Creativity and Imaginative Thinking

Television has been hypothesized to restrain creativity and imaginative thinking by three means: the foreclosure of imagination by the specificity of visual imagery; the rigid exposition of narratives that allow no time for personal reflection; and the conventionality of its themes, plots, and roles. The evidence comes from experiments (Greenfield & Beagle-Roos, 1988; Greenfield, Farrar, & Beagle-Roos, 1986; Kerns, 1981; Meline, 1976; Runco & Pezdek, 1984; Valkenburg & Beentjes, 1997; Vibbert & Meringoff, 1981; Watkins, 1988), surveys (Childs, 1979; Peterson, Peterson, & Carroll, 1987; Singer et al., 1984; Zuckerman, Singer, & Singer, 1980) and a quasi experiment (Williams, 1986) in which a community newly receiving television was compared with two communities that had been able to access the medium for many years.

The quintessential experimental comparison has been with stories that are read or heard. When asked to complete a story, children typically add less on their own to something seen on the screen than to similar stories read or heard. This effect, recorded repeatedly, is nevertheless better interpreted as a transient state than the inculcation of a trait. The nature of experiments, in which the less creative group would have been the more creative had assignments been reversed, compels such a conclusion – unless it can be demonstrated that such short-term effects would aggregate to a long-term deficit.

However, the quasi-experimental data of Williams and colleagues largely foreclose such a likelihood. In their three communities, one of which was receiving television for the first time, there were no significant associations between amount of viewing and creativity scores in the two communities that had access to television for many years, and in the community where television was new there was a small negative association on only one of the two major, recognized tests of creativity employed.

The ambitious experiment by Watkins (1988) importantly enlarges the picture. He asked third, fifth, and eighth graders to write stories that reflected either television or real life. The television stories were actually more elaborate and introduced thoughts and emotions on the part of the characters more often, and this was particularly the case for those who were heavier viewers of television.

The data overall lead to three conclusions, which depict a more nuanced and positive role for television in creativity and imaginative thinking than their hypothesized curtailment:

1 Young children, when asked to elaborate on a televised story will invent, embroider, and expand less than when the same story has been conveyed orally or in print – probably because the explicit visual images on the screen leave less need or room for imaginative innovation.

2 The documented suppression of creativity and imaginative thought – as measured by elaboration – is transient, and represents a state subject to changing circumstances rather than the diminishment of a trait.

3 When asked to engage in the creative and imaginative task of storytelling, television viewing among older children promotes more extensive effort, greater complexity, and the attribution of more thoughts and emotions to invented characters, although these tales are likely to conform to the conventions of television storytelling.

The varied evidence does not support effects leading to chronically greater or lesser degrees of creative and imaginative thought. In contrast, the evidence largely supports the view that television (and by implication, other screen media) gives shape and substance to the expression of creative and imaginative thought.

In Search of Explanation

None of the findings reported so far are satisfying in explaining the documented inverse association between amount of television viewing and scholastic performance. One does not have to stray far, however, to find a thoroughly convincing reason why those who view more fare less well on tests of achievement: heavy viewers, as a group, include a disproportionate number of young people whose attributes or behavior lead to poorer academic performance.

Comstock and Scharrer (1999, 2007) specify two factors that have had a particularly large role: mental ability and socioeconomic status (SES). Mental ability, measured by IQ tests, is inversely associated with amount of television viewing (Gortmaker, Salter, Walker, & Dietz, 1990) and, as one would expect, is positively associated with doing well in school. SES behaves similarly. Lower SES predicts lower performance in school (Fetler, 1984) and for decades has predicted greater amounts of television viewing (Comstock & Scharrer, 2007). In both cases, characteristics of the young person offer an explanation for the inverse association between viewing and achievement.

The links between mental ability and television viewing and between SES and television viewing are now somewhat weaker than they once were, because of the historical trend toward greater viewing by all population segments (Comstock & Scharrer, 1999), but are far from erased. They decidedly were well in place at the time of the collection of the CAP and other large sets of data. In the case of SES, even when there is an attempt to take it into account (as occurs when the CAP data are arrayed by occupational strata) SES will remain a factor within strata and thereby a potential explanation for any observed relationship between greater viewing and lower achievement.

Then there is the role of stress and conflict. Comstock and Scharrer (1999, 2007) draw from a number of different studies in concluding that children and teenagers who are troubled, worried, or quarreling with others are likely to turn to television as a source of relief. These same factors also are likely to lead to poorer performance in school. Again, characteristics of the young person offer an explanation.

The question is whether these undeniably influential forces are sufficient to account wholly for the kind of declining achievement curves visible in the CAP data. The answer lies in a large body of studies that disclose a variety of ways in which television may negatively affect scholastic performance.

Displacement

The displacement hypothesis, broadly phrased, holds that television takes time away from the maintenance and practice as well as the acquisition of the three basic skills – reading, writing, and mathematics (Comstock & Scharrer, 2007). In a narrower formulation, it has focused on reading (and in particular acquisition of the ability to read in the first to the third grades), for which television as a less demanding but equally sedentary (and similarly rewarding) activity would seem a formidable competitor that could extract a long-term and possibly lasting deficit in a crucial skill (Williams, 1986).

Shin (2004) provides an important test of a general form of the hypothesis by examining the role of several potentially competing factors in her analysis of about 1,200 families with children between the ages of 6 and 13. Overall, she found a modest negative correlation between viewing and achievement scores for reading and mathematics. She sought a variable in the available data (which were not collected for her purposes) that would test the displacement hypothesis, and found one in homework and study. As her path diagram shows, time spent on homework and study was suppressed by viewing but was positively associated with achievement (see Figure 28.4). Thus, her data support the view that television adversely affects achievement by taking time away from school-related activities.

Figure 28.4 Exploring pathways from television viewing to academic achievement in school age children. Reproduced with permission from N. Shin (2004). Exploring pathways from television viewing to academic achievement in school age children. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 165(4), 367–382.

Coefficients are standardized beta weights. *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001.

Interference

Armstrong and Greenberg (1990) in an experiment found that mental tasks done in the presence of an operating television set were inferior in quality. Those working in the company of the operating set scored lower in reading comprehension, spatial problem-solving, and cognitive flexibility. Shin in her sample of 6- to 13-year-olds found that impulsive behavior was slightly (but positively) correlated with viewing and was decidedly (if modestly) predictive of poorer performance. Koolstra and van der Voort (1996) in a sample of more than a thousand Dutch second and fourth graders found that those who viewed more invested less mental effort in reading, and this occurred after statistically eliminating the influence of mental ability as well as other variables. D. G. and J. L. Singer and colleagues (Desmond et al., 1990; Singer et al., 1988; Singer et al., 1984) consistently have found that viewing violent programming by very young children leads to problems of impulse control in the early grades. Interference by exposure to television with the quality of cognitive activity, and particularly with concentration and attention, is thus a candidate as a potential cause of the lowered scholastic performance by those who view more.

Socialization

The effects of television on reading by the young are not necessarily limited to decreases in time spent or amount of invested mental effort. They also arguably may include a variety of shifts in attitudes and tastes and preferences that influence not only the disposition to engage in reading but the types of material chosen to read, and thereby the rewards and satisfactions that reading will supply.

Morgan (1980) found in a large sample of adolescents that greater viewing was correlated with a preference for print media that featured entertainment stars and tales of teenagers. Koolstra and van der Voort (1996), of course, found among their second and fourth graders that greater viewing was associated with the expenditure of less mental effort when reading. They also found that the greater the viewing at an earlier time, the more likely these young people would choose comic books as favored reading and the more likely they would categorize books as dull, boring, and unrewarding.

These findings fit rather nicely with those of W. R. Neuman (1982). He found that people in general – he interviewed adults – mostly thought about the entertainment value and execution of programming while viewing rather than the social or moral implications of the content. The medium in effect cues rules about storytelling. This may have some positive aspects for children and adolescents when engaged in constructing narratives, as documented in Watkins' (1988) experiment, but it may also lead to the embrace of the banal and trivial (if temporarily absorbing and even occasionally exciting).

Process

These various findings are integrated in Figure 28.5, which draws together evidence from a variety of sources and assigns a role both to the characteristics of the young person (which irremediably lead to the expectation that on the average those who view more television will perform less well on tests of scholastic achievement) and to the more speculative negative influences of the medium (which appear to identify television viewing as contributing to lowered scholastic performance). Two concepts are added to those already introduced – centrality of television and other screen-related media in the home, and orientation toward the set, dichotomized somewhat arbitrarily into instrumental and ritualistic viewing.

Signs signify the direction of the expected relationship (+, −), and the number of signs the apparent (if subjectively judged) strength. The emphasis or explanatory weight is greatest for the characteristics of the child, evident in the factors and weights arrayed on the left side (and especially SES and mental ability). At middle left, the concept of household centrality of television is introduced as a fairly powerful explanatory factor for amount of viewing. This dimension, which varies substantially across households, represents the degree to which sets are constantly on, few if any rules or restraints constrain viewing, and viewing essentially is continuous throughout the day, and has proved to be a predictor of viewing independent of SES (Comstock & Scharrer, 1999, 2007; Rideout et al., 2010; Roberts & Foehr, 2004). The intent is to make explicit the role of household-level norms.

Figure 28.5 Path model: viewing, household and individual variables, and scholastic performance. From G. Comstock & E. Scharrer (2007). Media and the American child. San Diego, CA: Elsevier.

The possibly detrimental influences of television are represented largely by factors on the right, beginning with a specific instance of displacement (“Reading outside of assignments”) and continuing through another example of displacement (“Time spent on homework . . .”) and an instance of interference (“Time spent on homework with television”) and include two examples of attitudes of cultural socialization attributable to television (“Low esteem for book reading” and “Preference for banal material”). These are all factors empirically found to have been influenced by greater or lesser viewing, and each also has been found to have consequences for achievement.

Orientation toward the medium is introduced at the upper right. Rubin (1984) proposed the concepts of instrumental versus ritualistic use of television to distinguish between motivated, focused, interest-driven attention to specific content and viewing representing the desire to kill time, watch some television, or engage in a routine habitual for the time of day and circumstances. Motive affects not only attention to content but the kind of content chosen. Instrumental viewing that is selective and based on interests more often will lead to content that is emotionally and cognitively more demanding and sometimes more informative, and as a result can enhance achievement. Unhappily, ritualistic viewing accounts for the majority of viewing (Comstock & Scharrer, 2007).

Looking Ahead

Television viewing – with the rare exception – has been consistently recorded as a modest negative correlate of academic achievement. There also have been empirically based justifications for taking at least the possibility of a causal contribution seriously.

Other Media

There have been comparatively little data collected on the systematic influence on scholastic performance of the quantity of consumption of media other than television, primarily because among the young (as well as other demographic groups) none has rivaled television in access, popularity or amount of time allocated. An exception are the recent national Kaiser Foundation surveys (Rideout et al., 2010; Roberts & Foehr, 2004; Roberts, Foehr, & Rideout, 2005), which comprehensively collected data on all media – screen, audio, and print.

The measure of achievement was self-reported grades for the nationally representative samples of 8- to 18-year-olds. This is not a strong measure compared to actual recorded grades or scores on standardized achievement tests, which were the criteria in the major data sets reviewed so far. It risks obscuring effects by grade inflation (in the most recent survey, almost two-thirds claimed “mostly As and Bs”). At the same time, it makes any relationship particularly convincing because such an upward migration would make any associations harder to find.

In the most recent survey, conducted in 2009 (Rideout et al., 2010), amount of media use overall (of which the largest component is television content, however disseminated) was negatively associated with grades. Media use overall was also positively associated with various measures of unhappiness and lower self-satisfaction. In both cases these relationships withstood statistical controls for important other variables.

Nearly half (47%) of all heavy media users said they usually got fair or poor grades (mostly Cs or lower), compared to 23% of light media users. Heavy media users were also more likely to say they got into trouble a lot, were often sad or unhappy, and were often bored. Moreover, the relationships between media exposure and grades, and between media exposure and personal contentment, withstood controls for other possibly relevant factors such as age, gender, race, parent education, and single versus two-parent households (Rideout et al., 2010, p. 4).¹

In contrast, print use, defined as “reading for pleasure” to set it apart from school-related media use, was positively associated with grades. The average for the 8- to 18-year-olds in 2009 was 38 minutes a day (compared to the four-and-a-half hours for screen media), with those who did read spending a more impressive 57 minutes. The relationship with grades was modest but decidedly positive: among those who read the most, 72% received high grades while the comparable figure for those classified as reading the least (or not at all) was 60%.

These data, more than six decades after the introduction of television in the late 1940s, record not only impressive, substantial increases in the amount of media consumption by the young but also three persisting (and therefore also noteworthy) patterns. The first is the negative association between media use and scholastic performance, with media overall in these data now substituted for television. The second is the appearance of personal discomfort as a factor in the amount of media use that might also interfere with scholastic performance; this is consistent with the well-known, often recorded positive association between stress and use of television (Comstock & Scharrer, 2007). The third is the identification of print use as contributing positively to academic achievement, a factor occupying a prominent place in the model (again, see Figure 28.5).

The data overall lead to the conclusion that time spent with media, and in particular television and other screen media that are the major components of media exposure and use, depress scholastic achievement. To dismiss this possibility is to ignore not only those many negative correlations and the often huge samples on which they are based (which could be justified by invoking the characteristics of the child), but also to dismiss the concepts of displacement, interference, and socialization. The Kaiser data do not absolve television and screen media because of the weakness of the achievement measure, but they do hint that the pattern of the past several decades may be changing.

Those most at risk would seem to be the 20% or so who are the heaviest viewers. This is certainly the group where achievement scores of all types are the lowest (again, see Figure 28.1). However, this is probably too simplistic. This group that registers the greatest deficit in achievement is also certain to contain many of those with characteristics that predict both greater viewing and lower achievement. The crucial factor is the opportunity cost of a particular mode of media consumption. Thus, those at risk cannot be identified by amount of media use alone.

Amount of viewing inevitably raises the question of content. As Schmidt and Vandewater (2008) sensibly argue in their review, the effects of how much is viewed depend partly on what is viewed. The data examined here represent what is ordinarily viewed and do not reflect what might have occurred had other viewing choices been made. Thus, content matters. Overall amount of viewing by children and teenagers has been negatively associated with achievement while the viewing of educational programming, when incorporated in the research design, has positively predicted achievement. The explanation (at least to an important degree) is that overall viewing has usually been dominated by entertainment. This factor is made explicit in the model (Figure 28.5) by the concepts of instrumental and ritualistic viewing, where instrumental viewing is a positive predictor of achievement (and is intentionally broad enough to encompass a wide range of content as long as its viewing is motivated by interest).

The increasing similarity of social strata and demographic groups in use of screen media (with use greater for most), a long-term historical trend (Comstock, Chaffee, Katzman, McCombs, & Roberts, 1978; Comstock & Scharrer, 1999), implies that negative correlations with achievement scores will weaken (because those with stronger social and intellectual credentials for achievement will be spending more time attending to those media). Displacement may lose some of its force in response to conceivably better time management and a higher proportion of instrumental viewing among the recent recruits to greater screen use. Quite possibly, this is what has already been observed in the Kaiser Foundation surveys (Rideout et al., 2010; Roberts & Foehr, 2004; Roberts et al., 2005). In turn, the positive role for print is likely to be diluted by electronic media, whose informational role will be somewhat obscured by the large proportion of electronic media use devoted to personal and social communication. The pursuit of relationships between use of specific media and scholastic performance will become ever more problematic – and possibly hopeless – as the conditions and circumstances on which such relationships rest fade away.

NOTE

1 Heavy media use was defined as more than 16 hours of exposure per day (about one-fifth of the sample); moderate = 3-16 hours; light = fewer than three hours (slightly fewer than one-fifth of the sample).

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