Posted on 11/18/2012 4:50:47 PM PST by mdittmar
A new study released on Thursday finds teachers are concerned that the amount and types of electronic media that children interact with at home may be harming their performance in the classroom.
Common Sense Media, a think tank focused on children’s media use, polled 685 public and private elementary and high school classroom teachers on how children’s increasing use of television, video games, texting, social networking, music and other forms of media is affecting their performance in school.
The study found that 71% of teachers polled said students’ media use hurts their attention spans in school, while 59% said students’ use of entertainment media has also harmed their ability to communicate face to face. A slightly smaller amount, 58%, said they believe it’s had a negative impact on their writing skills, according to the study conducted by Knowledge Networks May 5-17.
Nearly half of the teachers surveyed also said their students’ use of media at home is hurting the quality of their homework. “Many teachers think students spend so much time with media that they neglect their homework and aren’t prepared in class,” according to the report, which noted that children between the ages of 8 and 18 spend more than seven-and-a-half hours a day using media for fun.
Elementary school teachers pointed to video games, television, and computer games as causing the most problems for their students, while teachers said middle and high school students are more negatively impacted by texting and social networking. Two-thirds of teachers also said they believe that entertainment media has a “very” or “somewhat” negative impact on students’ sexualization.
Still, teachers did point to some benefits from students’ increased use of entertainment media at home with 63% saying it has helped students find information more quickly and efficiently, while a minority, 34%, said they believe it has improved students’ ability to multitask.
“We know that our children learn from the media they consume. This survey is yet another reminder of how critical it is to consistently guide our kids to make good media choices and balance the amount of time they spend with any media and all of their other activities,” Common Sense Media founder and CEO James Steyer said in a statement.
They’d better be adept in electronic communication, or they’ll be left behind.
I’ve been saying it for a long time. All the advances in communication technology are destroying peoples ability to communicate.
And the most anti social, unpolished and lonely group of people I've ever seen. (for all their social media stuff too).
Their attention span went away when Sesame Street came on the scene in the 60’s.
Logical, subject-related homework, lots of it, and performance-based grading leaves them no time. For those who don’t care or who are addicted, Oh Boy.
Also, incentivize group parent meetings.
Primary - classic curriculum has many advantages 1- keeps kids interested- characters in classical lit and their behaviors and interactions are interesting, logical and instructive. 2 - kids know we care about them when we teach them relevant subjects. etc.
Many of the skills that were important in the past will not be or are not important now or in the future.
Writing in cursive? Archaic. Forget that I got graded on it in grade school.... It's not required today.
I've seen teens of today communicate. Looks like they communicate among themselves just fine. I may not understand it, but I'm also archaic.
New times, new ways. The rate of change will only increase.
/johnny
But can they communicate well with anyone outside their peer group?
Yeah, the kids can’t be indoctrinated properly when they might have access to the truth and what’s really going on in America.
“I’ve been saying it for a long time. All the advances in communication technology are destroying peoples ability to communicate.”
And you would be wrong...
It’s actually improving it.
Sesame Street has a lot to do with the deterioration of education, according to a former eng prof. She said students raised with it expect to be entertained in the class. Said she never heard things like “I don’t want to do that it’s boring”, prior.
Kids are hungry for the truth and also are willing to learn to communicate. They enjoy gaining knowledge and knowing. they just need a good environment.
Teachers need to quit whining and teach. Treat kids with respect, discipline them, be willing to be a bossy adult, and concede to never being their friend until they are adults, treat the boys like gents and they will be opening doors by the end of the year, and homework every night no questions asked (except holidays respect their need for a break).
^^^But can they communicate well with anyone outside their peer group^^^
Why would that be important these days? It isn’t like 80% of the world’s wealth is controlled by folks over the age of 60. Wait....what?
I'm as uncomfortable as anyone with the changes, but they are going to happen, whether I like it or not.
I saw a group of children of my many cousins a while back and I was wearing the Phil Zimmerman PGP T-shirt, from back when PGP was outlawed and Clinton was trying to outlaw all encryption.
The kids looked at the front, saw it was radical perl code, looked at the back and read "This Shirt Is a Munition" and freaked out that I was wearing something that belonged in a museum (according to them).
It hasn't been THAT long ago. But for them it is ancient history.
/johnny
It makes people be in too much of a hurry and have no respect for patience.
It makes people be in too much of a hurry and have no respect for patience.
Oh well. The majority of them are meant for menial jobs anyway. I suppose those capable of rising above this trend will do so.
He couldn't imagine today's world. I try to remember that, and temper my judgements of the next generation.
/johnny
He was right. A glance at the last election shows me what happens 60 years after you stop teaching Greek. Does the phrase “doomed to repeat it” ring a bell?
When I was a small child, I overheard my paternal grandfather telling my mother that while I had hebrew, french, and latin education... that I didn’t have any grounding in greek would mean I was uneducated and remain ignorant.
Grandpa was right. Students who have taken even a single year of Latin and/or Greek score much higher on SATs and most other measures than do students who have not studied Latin and Greek. Educators stopped requiring Latin and Greek because they require a fair amount of rote memory in the first year of study and rote memory might bore poor Johnny, whose teachers have been taught by the “progressive” teacher training schools that Johnny’s studies should not tax his little brain and should be fun, fun, fun all the time. These “untaxed” students are getting taxed mightily now as a result of their inability to understand how bad Obama is for them and the country.
Needs to be on balance as mentioned at the end of the article.
Government schools do more harm to kids than anything else.
No, they stopped requiring Latin and Greek, because it would required TEACHERS who themselves understood Latin and Greek. It's hard enough to find teachers who understand proper English grammar, or high-school algebra. Teachers these days come from the lowest SAT stratum.
One of the casualties of modern media is patience and concentration. Professional web developers are trained that a website which requires the user to search for more than 4 seconds will result in the user clicking the back button and finding another website.
However, when you look at all of the major intellectual accomplishments since the middle ages, they have all been due to the ability to study and concentrate (something developed, for Westerners at least, in the monasteries and later in the universities) and focus carefully on minutia. No one can comprehend (much less improve upon) highly technical sciences like quantum mechanics while "multi-tasking".
So far I have seen no evidence that whatever skills that modern youth are developing through multi-media consumption will be more efficient or of greater value than the skills that they are demonstrably losing... including those patterns of thinking that have created the modern world and all of its advances...
Read, “The Dumbest Generation”, it’s an eye opener. With all the electronic communication our kids are getting dumber than dirt.
The convenience of the web spoils us. That four seconds may whittle down to two as overall performance improves in the future. People get expectations.
I saw him freaking out one day, he was speaking really fast and his speech was unintelligible to me until I saw that he was saying the dialogue of a show on the TV. He was saying it so fast that the average person could not follow what he was saying.
I think the real issue teachers have with the media is they are worried that computer courses will make their jobs go away.
Do you really think that greek made that much difference?
/johnny
When I was a small child, I overheard my paternal grandfather telling my mother that while I had hebrew, french, and latin education... that I didn’t have any grounding in greek would mean I was uneducated and remain ignorant.
He couldn’t imagine today’s world. I try to remember that, and temper my judgements of the next generation.
/johnny
_______________________
Funny to hear that. I had French, Italian, Latin and English languages as well as a smattering of German. , and my children think that they are “all that and a bag of chips” when they learned Spanish. They have no clue.
no greek though. Although is was offered at school.
I can't disagree with that. Private school or home school is the only way to go.
/johnny
My 14yo daughter absolutely refuses to take Spanish in school. Her attitude is all she needs to do to learn it is stop in the local convenience store.......
She had the opportunity in 8th grade to take Spanish 1, but chose chorus/music instead and will be taking French1 next semester. She started teaching herself French when she was in kindergarten, and now is earning Japanese on her own.
/johnny
And, yet, many schools want to put iPads in these kids’ hands instead of textbooks!!
Are we now in a race to see if we can produce the DUMBEST kids on the planet!!???
*SNORT*
Actually, my aunt speaks to her in Spanish at times, and French as well. She had spent 20+ years of her career in Spanish speaking countries and it is practically 2nd nature to her. In July the 2 of them went to a Japanese Art Deco exhibit at the John Ringling Museum and my aunt was duly impressed by how much my daughter was able to translate.
I worked in the communications industry for over 30 years. We had a saying that went like this: "Those of us in the communications industry do the least amount of it."
And, unfortunately, it is STILL true!!
If a system can save $$ by using electronic books, I don’t have a problem with that. Catholic schools here in Indiana are using them, and believe me they are the ones that struggle with budgets.
Grandpa makes sure they know what a trebouchet is, why it is important, and can rebuild the model that I gave them. That set, at least is getting a good education.
The other poor grandkids are in California. Lord help 'em.
/johnny
My daughter, in 9th grade, has plenty of textbooks - but is allowed to bring her own iPad to school for note taking. I have noticed her note taking ability to have improved immensely since she started bringing it to school, as she types faster than she writes.
However, classwork and assignments to be turned in must be handwritten - and legibility is part of the grades.
/johnny
Good for Grandpa!
The majority of who are meant for menial jobs? Teenagers?
I am a GED instructor and a mother of two children born 15 years apart. I would say this is ABSOLUTELY true.
I read where they did a man-on-the-street in China where they have been using electronic gadgets a lot longer than us. They asked 20 somethings to write their name. They could not remember the characters. Without their gadgets they can’t communicate in writing.
The technology is moving faster than we are. We need to slow down and help these young folks learn the basics. The can pick up the technology on their own later. We did!
Right, it has nothing to do with the Teachers Unions or the over-paid pre-madonna Teachers that do anything but actually teach in the classrooms. They're too focused on political correctness and the homosexual agenda to do that.
Humans.
I love dead trees.
Gee... ya think so!
Otherwise, paper books, besides my antique collection, are more expensive, more liable to damage, take up more room, and don't give me any benefit for my day-to-day reading.
I don't need any more dead trees in the house for day-to-day reading.
/johnny
You can know how to operate social media and NOT be irresponsible and obsessed with it. There is a lot to learn in life and relationships with others requires human interaction. Self discipline is a lost art.
Video games and social media should not replace human interaction and reading.
I don’t know why, but books are comforting to me.
Dead tree books, no batteries required.
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