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Media Use, Reading, and Academic Achievement

It is common for elementary and secondary educators to blame declining academic achievement in reading and reading ability on their students' use of electronic media. Citing such anecdotal phenomena as students' difficulty in reading texts, lowered attention spans, and preoccupation with films, television, video games, and most recently, computers, teachers and caregivers are quick to make a causal connection.

Academic Achievement

The bulk of research on relationships betweeen academic achievement and media use center on the medium of television. In more than 25 years of research investigating the relationships between these domains, there is a consistent, usually moderate, sometimes weak, always negative correlation between TV watching and academic achievement for both elementary-and secondary-level students. While the majority of these studies are correlational, several have been interrupted time-series designs that lend themselves to more causal interpretations. In the correlational investigations, some with samples of several thousand, there is either a negative relationship between viewing and grades on state-mandated achievement test scores or a curvilinear relationship, where the negative correlation appears at some level of viewing, usually between 3 and 4 hours per day. In a thorough critical review of this literature, the authors attribute causality to key variables in the equation:

The evidence supports a three-factor process in which large amounts of viewing not only (a) displace skill acquisition but also (b) interferes with further practice, or skill development and maintenance, and (c) lower the quality or value by decreased capacity of practice done in conjunction with television. (Comstock & Paik, 1991, p. 86)

Several recent investigations have specifically explored “practice done in conjunction with television,” and results indicate that for college students, homework done when a television is on in the room is of lower quality than silent study or study accompanied by music. This deterioration is most pronounced when the subject of study is difficult for the student. The data suggest that even if the television is not being watched, its mere presence is enough to degrade critical thinking about the material being studied.

Reading Proficiency

There is accumulating evidence for the decline of reading ability as a function of TV viewing. In the only published meta-analysis (23 studies, 274 correlations), television viewing was negatively correlated with reading ability and other dimensions of academic achievement, and the magnitude of the correlation rises sharply after 20 hours per week of viewing (Walberg & Haertel, 1992). Research reviews of the past three decades also find a consistent negative relationship. Extracting from a line of investigations, 3 hours of TV per day may be the critical peak in the decline of reading ability. In a longitudinal study of parent-child communication and its implications for media use, preschool children who were heavy viewers of television were less capable readers than lighter viewers by Grade 1 (Desmond, Singer, Singer, Calam, & Colimore, 1985). In light of small to moderate effect sizes found in much of the research, it is important to emphasize that if television viewing displaces as little as 15 minutes of homework per day, its ultimate impact is tremendous.

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