Natural Experiments, Impact on Creativity and School Achievement

Reading Skills

Many researchers have found that students who report watching more TV tend to be poorer readers and to do worse in school than students who watch less TV. On average, students who obtain lower scores on tests of general intelligence also tend to be poorer readers, to read less, to read different material, to do worse in school, and to watch more TV. The significant negative relationship between reading achievement and TV viewing, however, becomes smaller after the relationship of IQ to both TV and reading scores is removed. The difficulties in interpreting correlational data among the many variables related to TV and school achievement underscore the importance of the opportunity to study Notel students before and after TV reception became available because causal inferences can be made in natural experiments, provided that alternative possible explanations (threats to internal validity) of the results can be ruled out.

When first learning to read, children focus on decoding individual letters and words. Later, reading becomes more automatic and fluent, with a brief glance being sufficient to process an entire phrase. Raymond Corteen and Tannis MacBeth Williams (1986) examined this fluent/automatic phase of reading in all three towns in Phase 1, just before Notel obtained TV, gathering data on students in grades 2, 3, and 8, and 2 years later in Phase 2 on students in grades, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, and 10. Two years after Phase 2, grade 2 students in all three towns were reassessed. Each student was tested individually. Children looked into a device that controls the amount of time the item is available to be seen; they had to read a series of items from a standardized reading test that were shown very briefly. Some were words, some were [Page 618]phrases, and some were nonsense words, that is, words that follow English spelling rules but are not true words, for example, sked. About 500 students in total were tested. In addition to this individual test of fluent reading skills, Phase 1 students completed a group reading test that assessed both comprehension and vocabulary. These group reading tests were given in all three towns to 813 students in grades 1 through 7 near the end of the school year, 6 months after the arrival of TV in Notel.

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