Screen Time Study Finds Education Drop-Off
With children spending more time in front of screens than ever,
parents sometimes try to convince themselves that playing Angry Birds
teaches physics, or that assembling outfits on a shopping app like Polyvore fires creativity.
According
to a study scheduled for release on Friday, however, less than half the
time that children age 2 to 10 spend watching or interacting with
electronic screens is with what parents consider “educational” material.
Most of that time is from watching television, with mobile devices
contributing relatively little educational value.
What is more, the study, by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center,
a nonprofit research institute affiliated with the Sesame Workshop, the
nonprofit producer of “Sesame Street,” shows that as children spend
more time with screens as they get older, they spend less time doing
educational activities, with 8- to 10-year-olds spending about half the
time with educational content that 2- to 4-year-olds do.
Athena
Devlin, a professor of women’s and American studies at St. Francis
College in Brooklyn and the mother of two children, said that her son,
Elias, a kindergartner, still watched quite a bit of public television,
including shows like “Wild Kratts” and “Dino Dan,” and that she has been
impressed by the detailed facts he learns.
But
her daughter, Laura, a fourth grader, prefers shows like “Jessie” on
the Disney Channel or “Total Drama Island” on the Cartoon Network, which
Professor Devlin sees as the preteen equivalent of her own addiction to
“Scandal.”
“I
feel like with the educational content of television, the bottom drops
out of it after age 5 or 6,” she said. “It’s a bummer, and I’ve looked
out for it.”
She
said that when playing games, her daughter liked Wizard101, while both
children gravitated toward Fruit Ninja or Clumsy Ninja, whose
educational value Professor Devlin does not rate highly.
“It would be nice if they could get pleasure out of something that also taught them something,” she said.
According
to the survey, 2- to 4-year-olds spent a little over two hours a day on
screen, with one hour and 16 minutes of educational time, while 8- to
10-year-olds spent more than two and a half hours a day on screen, but
only 42 minutes was considered educational. The survey was based on
interviews with 1,577 parents and conducted online from June 28 to July
24 by GfK, a research company.
The
survey allowed parents to assess whether a game or program taught
social and emotional skills, as well as cognitive learning related to
vocabulary, math or science.
The
survey said lower-income families reported that their children spent
more time with educational programming on screen than middle-income and
higher-income families did. Families earning less than $25,000 said 57
percent of their children’s screen time was educational, while families
earning $50,000 to $99,000 said it was 38 percent.
Michael
H. Levine, the executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, said
that particularly for the most vulnerable children who might falter in
their academic careers, “we need to have a better balance in the way
these media are used.”
Vicki
Rideout, who wrote the report, said that with teachers seizing on
digital media as a new way to ignite children’s interest at school, more
needed to be done to ensure that out-of-school screen activities were
not only educational but of high quality.
“It’s
far too easy for the best stuff only to be available for the kids who
already have many opportunities,” said Ms. Rideout, “and to flip into
content that has the gloss of education on it, without the substance,
for the kids who are in need.”
Michael
Thornton, a second-grade teacher at Meriwether Lewis Elementary School
in Charlottesville, Va., and the father of three children under 6, said
parents were increasingly asking him for referrals to educational apps,
like Geared and Glass Tower, for teaching math and spatial recognition
skills, and Chicktionary, for vocabulary.
But, he acknowledged, “you have to really take your time to search through them.”