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Wednesday, March 1, 2006
Television and Test Scores
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Does watching too much TV hurt your kid in school?
A couple of University of Chicago researchers were surprised to find no negative effect on test scores when they looked at kids in the 1960s who had television and compared them to kids who did not. Television seemed to benefit kids who came from homes where parents didn’t speak English as a first language or whose parents were not well educated.
What that told me is television provided kids with vocabulary and information they might not have otherwise encountered. The study challenges the widely held notion that television is a corruptive force on a child’s brain.
I asked a couple of local experts what they thought about kids and television.
Caitlin Dooley, assistant professor at Georgia State, said it’s important that parents help make television interactive for their children. Parents should talk to their kids about the story and get kids to explain what they’re watching. There are good programs out there, said Dooley, a literacy expert. She likes Blues Clues and of course Sesame Street. She said it’s okay to allow children to indulge in the fantasy world offered by television and the computer, but you want to bring them back to real-world social interactions.
Clare Hobart, pre-first teacher at The Westminster Schools, said she loves television. “I do think you can learn from it,” she said. Her students often tell her things they learn watching Animal Planet and other educational programs. Her biggest concern is the bad language children pick up from cartoons, TV shows aimed at adults and movies. “So many parents say, ‘We don’t let our kids watch television,’ but they run to get the latest movie.”
Connie Lacy, a DeKalb County mother of three boys, let her oldest son, now grown, watch lot of television. Later, when Lacy was raising her two younger children, she made an effort to engage them in things other than television. She says her younger kids have done better in school than her oldest. “I feel like I let him down,” she says of her eldest.
Her younger sons, ages 15 and 12, like to make videos, write stories, record themselves on tape and perform on a stage she built in the basement. Her local library once admonished her for having more than 50 books checked out. Her kids watch TV so rarely that they are out of the loop when it comes to pop culture references, she said. But she wouldn’t change it. “In the long run, I feel like my kids are active and happy.”
I have friends who feel guilty if they park their kids in front of the TV for even thirty minutes so they can have some grown-up talk. On the opposite extreme, some kids are sitting glassy-eyed in front of the tube for hours on end.
How much TV do you let your child watch, and do you worry about the effects of television on their schooling?
