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.
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.
I'm down to about 1000 paper books in the house, including my special collection, and quit buying paper books this year, unless they are antique or collectible.
I did become more comfortable with e-books over the last few years and this is the year I changed over for purchases.
/johnny
E-books. Very little 'lektrikity required.
I've got lots of dead tree books, some printed 100 years before I was born. Many more that I bought in airports right before a flight. Some from estate sales I went to in the '80s and bought libraries in whole lots.
I'm comfortable buying e-books and reading them. I find them to be more handy and convenient than my shelves full of books.
/johnny
And yet...once they fell out of favour, they faced a life of ruination and poverty - that is, if they got out alive. Many were executed by the King when they became liabilities or when the King decided that he was being used. In the U.K., until Beau Brummel came along, every favourite ended his swath-cutting by either being executed or banished to a ruined life.
After looking at some of the liberal hysterics during election season, I'm tempted - even though it has a tincture of pop-psychology jargon - to think of them as suffering from "King's Favourite Syndrome." Many of them really believe that they falling out of favour with the federal government will ruin them. They're like a fellow who holds onto his job at all costs, convinced that if he loses his present job he's destined to die on welfare. Only in their case, their "company" is the government.
Should that dumbing-down continue, the syndrome will only get worse because it'll have more basis in truth. One of the "meta-educations" kids got in the olden days was how to be resourceful. Now, it all seems to be crowdsourcing: asking around.
Today's children can be and are resoureful, and have specialized skillsets.
I postulate that a world shift has happend that requires, simply by virtue of complexity, that no person can know everything, or even be familiar with everything.
Linux is probably the most widespread server operating system in the world, and no single person can grasp the whole of it. It is 'crowdsourced', with no central authority, except over the kernel, and that's not very centralized.
/johnny
The founding fathers’ standard education included Greek and Latin and Hebrew from early years. It would have been unthinkable that they wouldn’t study these - and Hebrew - if they were going to be well-educated. That generation had the option of giving their commencement addresses in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. They learned all three well and their studies in the languages started very young.
http://www.memoriapress.com/articles/founding-fathers.html
http://21stcenturycicero.wordpress.com/tyrrany/the-founding-fathers-the-classics/
http://www.collegeplus.org/blog/how-they-did-it-—the-founding-fathers-education-and-collegeplus
http://tickerforum.org/akcs-www?post=198260
Just using books, the library, etc weren't good enough.
“Their attention span went away when Sesame Street came on the scene in the 60’s”
I absolutely agree completely. So called educational TV programming gave rise to the “edutainment” mindset from toddlerhood. If not being electronically entertained, they are “bored”. And the short segment bursts of images encourage ADD and lack of concentration, even if it is the alphabet dancing about on the screen.
I severely limited our own daughters access to TV, with no NPR programming, and emphasized reading from a young age. Three are early 20 somethings - one is an ER nurse, one is a 3L at a top tier law school and will graduate at just 23 years old (is on law journal - any FReeper lawyers hiring in the NYC area?), one is an Acting BFA major and the high school freshman just received her report card with a 95 average taking all honors/regents courses. This is a total brag and anti TV rant, but it is proof (even if anecdotal) that we are correct about Sesame Street.
Too much information, not enough knowledge.
I'd hate to say how many grade-school teachers I have taught to add fractions.
Teachers are the Communist Party’s ‘useful idiots’...or are outright members of the party.
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