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.
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!
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