The Sky is Not Falling

When considering research about education and learning, it's important to read beyond the headlines.

A major news outlet recently ran a story under the headline "Study finds video games lead to decreased academic motivation". As a headline, it fits nicely into several of the narratives out there about children, school, video games, and the modern world. There is a great deal of conflicting information floating around about the impact of video games. Most of what we see in the mainstream media is anti-gaming, but there is a growing body of research that finds benefits from at least some types of game playing. I suspect that the truth lies somewhere in between, involving so many variables that it will always come down to a case-by-case basis. A gaming scenario that negatively impacts one kid will prove to be positive to another and neutral to most, like with pretty much everything.

I clicked the link wanting to know more. When the article turned out to be the usual fear-mongering, I went directly to the paper which was recently published by The Cambridge Press. The study itself is entitled, "Longitudinal associations between gaming and academic motivation during middle childhood." The very first line of the study reads, "Child video game playing ("gaming") may lead to decreased child academic motivation. Conversely, children with low academic motivation may seek fulfillment through gaming." In other words, the study's authors take no stand on cause or effect. They only note that gaming and lower academic motivation are statistically associated.

To be honest, the entire study seems to be a bit of a waste of time, although it probably somehow moves the needle in a way that will be useful to future researchers. But the bottomline is that this study seems to find that gamers tend to be less interested in school than non-gamers, but stops far short saying that gaming causes low motivation as the "news" headline declares.

This is an example of media fear-mongering, which is all too common when it comes to mainstream reporting on educational matters. If you're just a headline skimmer, you will believe that gaming, smartphones, and pretty much everything we older adults didn't grow up with are harming an entire generation of children. You will believe that we are facing an educational crisis, that our schools are failing, and that parents are too distracted or lazy to care. And, you know, maybe all of those things are true at some level and for some children, but the greater truth is that "good news" headlines don't generate nearly as many clicks as "bad", and "neutral" news isn't news at all, so we see the fear-mongering again and again because that's how the bills get paid.

I'm far more concerned about the impact of this fear-mongering on our children than I am about gaming. Fear-mongering causes parents, educators, administrators, and policy-makers to over-react, which too often means putting more restrictions on a generation of children that is already more tightly controlled than any previous generation. It leads to irrational calls for more academics, more homework, longer school hours, and more "discipline", which almost always means punishment. It calls for taking away the games and the phones in the same way we've pretty much abolished unsupervised play outdoors because of fear-mongering about stranger-danger. Ultimately, it all leads to even more anxiety and depression in our youth.

No one has ever stopped being afraid because someone told them to not be afraid. But I've found that when I make the effort to dig a little deeper, when I look behind the reporter's lazy biases and click-bait headline, I almost always discover that the sky really isn't falling after all.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours. 

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