Okay Geek Farm
Study - Gamers don't progress well in school
Ricardo Trejo
Photo by chelseacharliwhite - Flickr
The University of Denison, Ohio conducted a recent study basically saying that kids who play video games regularly have their academic progress stunned.
According to Robert Wels, a clinical psychologist and co-author of this certain study, found that: "For children without games, scores go up over time... For boys with games, scores remain relatively stable. You don't see the typical development in reading and writing."
Besides that one quote, there wasn't much specifics or cold hard data given to the souce material for this article, ABC News. But what we do know is that the participants of the study were boys 6 - 9 years old, and they were kids whose family didn't own a video game system. It was also noted that no girls were under review, since those conducting the research believed that females would find video games uninteresting, and so wouldn't provide meaningful results.
Uh huh... tell that our own editors, Kristen Perez or Ashley England.
I'm going to have to whole heartedly disagree with the core findings of this study. I for one have been playing games ever since before I went to my first class of kindergarten, and remarkably, according to this study, I was able to manage straight A's through out my entire school career. I eventually went to college and now I spend most of my days writing. Maybe I'm a small percentage or something but I think academic furtherance hangs on a lot more than just the mere fact that a kid maybe playing video games everyday. Speaking about my childhood and adolescence, I remember playing for hours on end - I didn't play in time incriments set by my parentals. Far from it actually. I recall doing plenty of marathons, especially during the NES age when turning off the console meant starting over from the beginning.
I think it's hard to gauge just how powerful games are affecting the youth of today, but I have experience within my own family where video games have had a positive effect when it came to school. My little brother has had trouble learning ever since before he picked up a gaming controller, but being able to play games and having to READ to get direction over what he needs to accomplish next cannot be a bad thing. Also, generally speaking, I'd say it'd be hard to play a whole length RPG without gaining some sort of smarts after the experience. I mean most of them have so much strategy contained with them, involving problem solving and massive amounts of reading, that'd it's be difficult not to learn a thing once you were finished.
Not only that, but all my friends back in school did great scholastically and we all played games ever since we were young boys. Here's something they should study next. College students, boys and girls, and ask them whether or not they play games, going back to when they first started playing and for how long each of their sessions would be. I really want to see those results, especially during a time when parents are constantly looking for the next "study" to prove that an outside source is the cause for their inability to teach their kid the necessary skills for life.
