Surprising Findings on Kids and TV : Children Mentally Active While Viewing, Academics Say
Contrary to popular belief, children do not passively stare at the screen when watching television but are as mentally active as when they read, according to an extensive review of research on the impact of TV sponsored by the Department of Education.
The study found that many other common beliefs about television, including that it has a powerful, negative effect on school achievement, are unsupported by scientific evidence. While the study does not assert that television is harmless, it draws some surprising conclusions:
--The clearest evidence indicates that television viewing, rather than displacing valuable thinking activity, most often takes the place of movies, radio, comic books and sports.
--There is no evidence that homework done in front of the TV is of poorer quality than homework done in silence, though the authors of the study warn that little research has been conducted on this question.
--While there is some evidence that TV viewing may reduce reading achievement, the impact seems to occur in the early years of elementary school and is probably temporary.
--There is no evidence that children become mesmerized by TV, and even preschool children show they make inferences about the programs they are watching. Children’s conversations indicate that they speculate about how the plot may be resolved, for example, and what is motivating characters to act in certain ways.
At the same time, the study authors, Daniel R. Anderson and Patricia A. Collins, as well as other academics who reviewed the paper, said parents should not conclude that they need not monitor the amount or content of TV programs their children watch.
Learning From TV
In fact, the researchers emphasize, children are learning actively from what they see on TV and “they may learn things parents do not want them to know,” Collins said.
Anderson is a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts and a leading specialist in the field. Collins is a graduate student at the university.
“I can’t believe how much television is blamed for in this society as far as children are concerned,” Collins said. “Because television is such a popular medium and everybody’s kids are being educated, people make these connections between TV and achievement scores. In fact, there’s no scientific evidence to back it up.”
Ron Pedone, an Education Department official, called the paper a “showcase piece” that opens the door for a new approach in research, shifting from a mind set that TV viewing is necessarily harmful to one looking at how the medium might be used constructively.
A Compilation
The paper, which does not contain original research, is a compilation of virtually all research done on TV’s effect on cognitive development. The paper covered research in various fields, including education, psychology and medicine.
Some of that research compared thinking skills of children in towns with and without TV. In other cases, children were exposed to TV and their behavior was observed immediately after. Sometimes researchers correlated the amount of TV viewed with a child’s performance on reading or other tests.
“I was really excited about this because it flies right in the face of the conventional wisdom about television,” Pedone said. Much of the discussion of TV viewing and its effects has been “emotionally charged,” he said. “What we may be arguing over is what we value rather than what the concrete evidence indicates.”
Anderson said his review found no evidence that children’s mental activity while watching TV is different from their mental activity while reading. Children are more mentally active when the material on TV is demanding or when it is assigned for them as a learning activity.
But the same is true for reading--when children are reading comic books or other entertainment material, they are less mentally active than when reading educational material.
Replacing Reading
Most of the TV children watch is entertainment rather than educational but it does not appear to be replacing educational reading, the authors said.
“Kids weren’t reading much before TV and they are not doing much now,” Collins said. “It doesn’t mean that more reading wouldn’t be good. It’s just that TV is not the culprit.”
Other researchers in the field have not disputed the authors’ conclusions but some feared it could be misinterpreted as evidence that TV viewing is harmless.
“To say parents should not be concerned about monitoring television would be a travesty,” said Laurie Krasny Brown, a former researcher at Harvard University’s graduate school of education, who reviewed the publication. “This was just one paper.”
She said the most nagging questions, which have not been adequately addressed in research, are those concerned with what behavior and attitudes children pick up from television. “There is clear evidence that children are learning behavior from television even if they don’t act on it at the time,” she said.
Punches Thrown
She told of experimental studies in which children were shown a cartoon in which one character repeatedly punches another. After the program, children demonstrated increased aggressiveness by punching dolls or clowns, especially when the punching behavior in the cartoon had not been punished.
And Brown cautioned that, while the effects of TV on cognitive development may be small, “that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”
Without commenting directly on the Anderson-Collins paper, Tannis MacBeth Williams, an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, said that the relationship between TV and school achievement has been oversimplified.
In her research, Williams found that children living in a Canadian town without TV were better able to generate ideas--to think of alternative uses for an object, for example--than their counterparts in towns with TV.
Two years later, after TV was introduced to the town, the children’s ability to generate ideas dropped to the same levels as those in the towns with TV.
Also, adults in the town without TV were able to solve creative thinking problems faster, and persisted longer in trying even when they failed to solve the problem, than adults in the towns with TV, she said.
Debunks Myths
Other researchers said they welcome the Anderson-Collins paper because it debunks many common myths.
“This is an extraordinary review of the literature, and I think the conclusions are correct,” said Aletha Huston, a professor of human development at the University of Kansas and co-director of the Center for Research on the Influence of Television on Children.
While Huston cautioned that there is little research on some of the questions Anderson and Collins examined, she said there has been enough research to say “probably, in and of itself, television viewing does not have much effect on school achievement.”
Several of the researchers cited other studies showing that up to about 10 hours of TV viewing a week correlated with improved school achievement, while more viewing correlated with lower achievement.
That does not indicate, however, that TV viewing causes the child to perform better or worse in school. The specialists agreed that other factors, including intelligence, socioeconomic status, family routines or parental attitudes about television, are just as likely to account for differences in achievement.
