Television's Impact on High School Achievement

Gaddy, Gary D.

doi:10.1086/268988

Cited by 48 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Findings supporting the third-variable hypothesis have indicated that frequent television viewing was associated with poor educational outcomes before but not after SES and other covariates were controlled. 12 In addition, the association of television viewing with attention and learning problems has been found to vary as a function of variables including age, SES, and television programming content.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extensive Television Viewing and the Development of Attention and Learning Difficulties During Adolescence

Johnson¹,

Cohen²,

Kasen³

et al. 2007

Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med

159

126

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Objective: To investigate the association of television viewing with educational and intellectual outcomes during adolescence and early adulthood.Design: Prospective epidemiological study.Setting: Families participating in the Children in the Community Study, a prospective longitudinal investigation, were interviewed at mean offspring ages 14, 16, and 22 years.Participants: A community-based sample of 678 families from upstate New York.Main Exposures: Television viewing, attention difficulties, learning difficulties, and educational achievement during adolescence and early adulthood. Main Outcome Measures:The Disorganizing Poverty Interview and age-appropriate versions of the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children.Results: Frequent television viewing during adolescence was associated with elevated risk for subsequent attention and learning difficulties after family characteristics and prior cognitive difficulties were controlled. Youths who watched 1 or more hours of television per day at mean age 14 years were at elevated risk for poor homework completion, negative attitudes toward school, poor grades, and long-term academic failure. Youths who watched 3 or more hours of television per day were the most likely to experience these outcomes. In addition, youths who watched 3 or more hours of television per day were at elevated risk for subsequent attention problems and were the least likely to receive postsecondary education. There was little evidence of bidirectionality in the association of television viewing with attention and learning difficulties. Conclusion:Frequent television viewing during adolescence may be associated with risk for development of attention problems, learning difficulties, and adverse longterm educational outcomes.Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2007;161:480-486

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extensive Television Viewing and the Development of Attention and Learning Difficulties During Adolescence

Johnson¹,

Cohen²,

Kasen³

et al. 2007

Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med

159

126

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…3 4 The distinction between the direct e¤ect of television content on the viewer and the indirect e¤ect working through displacement of other activities is discussed by Gaddy [1986] and Beentjes and Van der Voort [1988] among others.…”

Section: University Of Chicago and Nbermentioning

confidence: 99%

Preschool Television Viewing and Adolescent Test Scores: Historical Evidence from the Coleman Study^*

Gentzkow

Shapiro

2008

Quarterly Journal of Economics

148

100

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We use heterogeneity in the timing of television's introduction to di¤erent local markets to identify the e¤ect of preschool television exposure on standardized test scores during adolescence. Our preferred point estimate indicates that an additional year of preschool television exposure raises average adolescent test scores by about .02 standard deviations. We are able to reject negative e¤ects larger than about .03 standard deviations per year of television exposure. For reading and general knowledge scores, the positive e¤ects we …nd are marginally statistically signi…cant, and these e¤ects are largest for children from households where English is not the primary language, for children whose mothers have less than a high school education, and for non-white children. JEL classi…cation: I21, J13, J24Keywords: television, cognitive ability, mediaWe are grateful to Dominic Brewer, John Collins, Ronald Ehrenberg, Eric Hanushek, and Mary Morris (at ICPSR) for assistance with Coleman study data, and to Christopher Berry for supplying data on school quality. Lisa Furchtgott, Jennifer Paniza, and Mike Sinkinson provided outstanding research assistance. We thank Marianne Bertrand, Stefano DellaVigna, Ed Glaeser, Austan Goolsbee, Jim Heckman, Caroline Hoxby, Larry Katz, Steve Levitt, Ethan Lieber, Jens Ludwig, Kevin M. Murphy, Emily Oster, Matthew Rabin, Andrei Shleifer, Chad Syverson, Bob Topel, workshop participants at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, UC Berkeley, the NBER, the University of Notre Dame, and the APPAM, and four anonymous referees for helpful comments. E-mail: gentzkow@ChicagoGSB.edu, jmshapir@uchicago.edu. I IntroductionTelevision has attracted young viewers since broadcasting began in the 1940s. Concerns about its e¤ects on the cognitive development of young children emerged almost immediately, and have been fueled by academic research showing a negative association between early-childhood television viewing and later academic achievement. 1 These …ndings have contributed to a belief among the vast majority of pediatricians that television has "negative e¤ects on brain development" of In this paper, we identify the e¤ect of preschool exposure to television on adolescent cognitive skills by exploiting variation in the timing of television's introduction to U.S. cities. 2 Most cities …rst received television between the early 1940s and the mid-1950s. The exact timing was a¤ected by a number of exogenous events, most notably a four-year freeze on licensing prompted by problems with the allocation of broadcast spectrum across cities. Once it was introduced, television was adopted rapidly by families with children. Survey evidence suggests that young children who had television in their homes during this period watched as much as three and a half hours per day, and contemporary time-use studies show reductions in a wide range of alternative activities, including sleep, homework, and outdoor play. Evidence on television ownership suggests that the di¤usion 2 of television was broad-bas...

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“…The educational attainment effect is widely recognized by institutional actors in the world of arts and culture; here the school is generally perceived as a valued partner in shaping cultural dispositions and attitudes. Specifically, it seems likely that variation in intensity of reading as a function of educational level reflects in part the effect of how long the individual was inculcated with specifically scholastic "literary" reading taste categories, though the empirical robustness of this relation is sometimes challenged (Gaddy, 1986). School inculcation of attitudes toward culture may once again be interpreted in terms of the human capital theory (Becker, 1983).…”

Section: Socialization and Learning: The Duality Of The Educational Amentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading and Television-Watching : Changes in the Cultural Role of the School in the Age of Mass Education

Coulangeon¹

2009

Revue Française De Sociologie

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What are the cultural effects of generalized access to upper secondary education, which became effective in France in the 1980s and 1990s? Data on reading and television-watching suggest that reading is in decline, a decline concentrated among high school and higher education graduates, and that television occupies a greater place in the lives of generations who attended school in the 1980s and 1990s than in those of the preceding generations. These two developments result from a complex combination of the "net" and structural effects of mass education. Mass education has slowed the decline of reading and mitigated the increase in television-watching: the proportional weight in the population at large of categories most likely to read heavily and least likely to be intensive TV watchers -i.e., high school and higher education graduates-has grown, as reading and television-watching levels among the highest educated have gradually, over the generations, come to resemble those for the less educated. This combined development may be interpreted in two ways that are not necessarily mutually exclusive: 1) both the decline of reading and the increase in television-watching reflect a change in the cultural function of education, a change in turn due to changes in teaching methods and curriculum content reinforced by the sharp rise in influence of the mass media; but 2) these changes also reflect morphological changes in the world of upper secondary and higher education students: with the generalizing of access to the baccalauréat [French high school-leaving degree], the proportion of "inheritors" has considerably fallen. The changes can therefore be read persuasively both as a sign that schooling in France has lost some of its cultural authority and that cultural gaps within the generations who experienced mass education have narrowed.

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Television's Impact on High School Achievement

Cited by 48 publications

References 28 publications

Extensive Television Viewing and the Development of Attention and Learning Difficulties During Adolescence

Extensive Television Viewing and the Development of Attention and Learning Difficulties During Adolescence

Preschool Television Viewing and Adolescent Test Scores: Historical Evidence from the Coleman Study^*

Reading and Television-Watching : Changes in the Cultural Role of the School in the Age of Mass Education

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Television's Impact on High School Achievement

Cited by 48 publications

References 28 publications

Extensive Television Viewing and the Development of Attention and Learning Difficulties During Adolescence

Extensive Television Viewing and the Development of Attention and Learning Difficulties During Adolescence

Preschool Television Viewing and Adolescent Test Scores: Historical Evidence from the Coleman Study*

Reading and Television-Watching : Changes in the Cultural Role of the School in the Age of Mass Education

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About

Preschool Television Viewing and Adolescent Test Scores: Historical Evidence from the Coleman Study^*