Video games v. homework: Here’s a shocker!
The good folks at the University of Michigan (publishing in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine) have revealed the amazing fact that playing video games can cut down on homework time. You can find more readable summaries on almost every news web site out there (here’s one at random), although they tend to put spin and interpretation on the story.
The fact that video games interfere with homework is not news. Everyone knows there are lots of people who play too much and don’t get real-life things done.
While I think kids who read 30% less than they would otherwise are missing out, I’m not too worried about kids taking time away from homework to do some modest gameplay. Evidence abounds that kids today have too much homework (as well as too many structured activities thrust upon them by parents who want to overachieve through them and make up for being uninvolved). In fact, not too long ago NPR hosted a four-part series on the topic!
In the end, the study is horribly flawed. Using surveys from about 1,500 kids (not a bad number), it examines time spent on one weekday and one weekend day, which is simply not enough information to go on. Some folks cram all their homework into a quarter of the time and still get good grades. And we all know that getting good grades on homework correlates only poorly to actual intelligence, learning, and life preparedness—key things that the study didn’t examine at all.
It wouldn’t be even a little bit surprising to find that, on average, gamers actually perform better in school, on intelligence tests, and in life.
I’m certainly not advocating for an “unschooling” approach, allowing kids to play video games for eighteen hours a day if they’re so inclined. Good parent—and kids themselves, for that matter—know when video game playing is interfering with other parts of life. By all means, take steps to make sure that doesn’t happen! Set limits if necessary.
But don’t discount even entertainment-oriented video games as stellar learning tools, either. Passion for anything challenging is a passion for learning.
Add comment July 3rd, 2007