This is odd, I’m posting something that shows that gaming has a dark side when it comes to education. But this is a dark side on the “back end” of the exercise, not the front. From a study by Ralph and Todd Stinebrickner (picked up through Guardian Ed):
Using real-world data, it would never be possible to rule out with certainty that there are differences in study efficiency between RGAMEi groups. For example, it would be hard to provide direct evidence that even small amounts of video game playing would not harm a student’s short-term thinking skills to some extent. Nonetheless, given that our unique data allow us to rule out a seemingly close-to-exhaustive set of reasons that study efficiency may be different between the two groups and given that we find substantial differences in study quantity between the two groups, our findings seem to suggest rather strongly that study effort, as measured by the quantity that a student studies, plays a central role in determining grade performance. This suggests that simply increasing effort, even without refining study techniques, could make a substantial difference in academic outcomes. In the next section we attempt to quantify how much of a grade payoff there is to an extra hour of studying.
While not the primary focus of this paper, this paper also makes an important contribution to the peer effects literature in general and to the peer effects literature that achieves identification by using college roommates in particular. The goal of the empirical peer effects literature has been to look for empirical evidence that peer effects can matter. This paper provides depth to that literature by not only providing some of the strongest evidence that peer effects can matter, but also by providing perhaps the first direct evidence about an avenue (time-use) through which peer effects operate. This paper also makes a contribution to a substantial literature outside of economics by establishing that video games can have a large, causal effect on academic outcomes.
While parents and counselors everywhere are likely jumping for joy that they can now point to some thing that says distractions and your friends have an impact on academic performance. But wait… this also talks about increasing “effort”. I haven’t gone over the entire paper to fully grep “effort” but I’m thinking that this might be something that deserves some more investigation. Should there be efforts on the part of the instructor as well as the student to maximize study effort?
What about online and other alternative delivery methods? One might think of a typical online student as having one window open to a browser and another open to some manner of web game or other distraction. I wonder if this has as much of an impact when the distraction is self directed (WILB) or does this distraction require an external agent to have an impact on study effort?
I’m thinking WILB vs Peer Distraction might be an interesting followup study.
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