The Impact of Television Viewing on Mental Aptitude and Achievement: A Longitudinal Study

Gortmaker, Steven L.; Salter, Charles A.; Walker, Deborah Klein; Dietz, William H.

doi:10.1086/269230

Cited by 50 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 20 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…As predicted, higher amounts of television viewing were associated with poorer performance on all achievement measures. However, research by others (e.g., Childers & Ross, 1973;Gortmaker et al, 1990;Newman, 1988) and an interaction in this study involving the student's ethnic background suggest that this relationship might be mediated by factors such as adult supervision, what is being watched, and the student's level of cognitive development (Comstock, 1991). Participation in extracurricular activities was positively associated with residualized grades, indicating that the relationship between extracurricular activities and teacherassigned grades cannot be explained solely by the differential selection of high-achieving students into extracurricular activities.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 66%

Relationships between five after-school activities and academic achievement.

Cooper

Valentine²,

Nye³

et al. 1999

Journal of Educational Psychology

237

153

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Four hundred twenty-four students in Grades 6 through 12 and 1 parent of each completed a questionnaire concerning student participation in 5 types of after-school activities: homework, television viewing, extracurricular activities, other types of structured after-school groups, and jobs. Student standardized achievement test scores and class grades were also obtained. After-school activities contributed significantly to the prediction of achievement even after the student's gender, grade level, ethnicity, free-lunch eligibility, and level of adult supervision after school were statistically controlled. Generally, more time in extracurricular activities and other structured groups and less time in jobs and television viewing were associated with higher test scores and class grades. More time on homework was associated with better grades. The joint effects of all 5 after-school activities nearly doubled the predictive ability of any single activity.Although the structure, processes, and content of classroom instruction are certainly the major influences on achievement, characteristics of individual students and their families and how students spend their nonschool hours are also important contributors to how well students do in school. Researchers investigating factors that affect student academic achievement have focused on numerous influences that are external to the classroom. Among the student background variables, gender (Eccles, 1994), ethnicity (Gray-Little & Carels, 1997), and family socioeconomic status (SES; Tucker, Harris, Brady, & Herman, 1996) are widely regarded as the most influential individual differences. Among activities out of school, attention has focused mainly on time spent doing homework, watching television, participating in extracurricular activities and other structured after-school groups, and in employment.This article presents a study examining the relationships between after-school activities and student achievement. The study is unique in several ways. First, data on all five major types of after-school activities were collected on the

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 66%

Relationships between five after-school activities and academic achievement.

Cooper

Valentine²,

Nye³

et al. 1999

Journal of Educational Psychology

237

153

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…However, in a study of obesity and asthma in school-aged children, Figueroa-Munoz et al (2001) suggest that BMI may provide a better measure of fatness compared to skinfold thickness for studies of asthma and obesity because the increased amount of muscle and bone in obese children may influence the accuracy and repeatability of caliper measurements. Lastly, parental measures of children’s activity levels are subject to measurement error (Dollman et al, 2009; Gortmaker et al, 1990) and may fail to accurately capture children’s actual behaviors.…”

Section: Conclusion and Future Research Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Examining the temporal relationships between childhood obesity and asthma

Green

2014

Economics & Human Biology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Childhood obesity has become an issue of increasing concern to health researchers and policymakers in the United States. One important chronic health condition linked to obesity is pediatric asthma. Although researchers have speculated that both conditions may have common origins, the majority of research in this area has focused on a unidirectional relationship between obesity and later asthma. However, much of the literature is limited by its reliance on cross-sectional data and its failure to examine the possibility that asthma may influence weight fluctuations through changes in physical and sedentary activity. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K), I explore the bidirectional relationships between childhood obesity and asthma. The results in this paper suggest that past asthma levels are positively correlated with changes in BMI and the onset of obesity. However, only new onset asthma is positively correlated with subsequent changes in BMI. The potential mechanisms are unclear, as I find little evidence that asthma is structurally related to changes in physical or sedentary activity over time. When testing the prevailing hypothesis that obesity is related to subsequent asthma, I find that lagged weight status is strongly related to asthma prevalence levels but that the onset of overweight or obesity is not associated with the subsequent onset of asthma. These results suggest that the onset of asthma may be related to subsequent weight gain over time.

show abstract

“…Still, when family social characteristics are controlled for, there does not seem to be conclusive evidence that television-watching has a negative effect on scholastic performance (Williams, Haertel, Haertel and Walberg, 1982;Gortmaker, Salter, Walker and Dietz, 1990;MacBeth, 1996;Caille and Monfort, 1999).…”

Section: The Effect Of Cultural Capital On Scholastic Performance: Rementioning

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

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

The Impact of Television Viewing on Mental Aptitude and Achievement: A Longitudinal Study

Cited by 50 publications

References 20 publications

Relationships between five after-school activities and academic achievement.

Relationships between five after-school activities and academic achievement.

Examining the temporal relationships between childhood obesity and asthma

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

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About