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'Ban the box' campaign launched

The Telegraph has reported on the ‘ban the box’ campaign, launched today by Dr Aric Sigman. British children aged 11 to 15 now spend 55% of their waking lives in front of televisions and computers.
Dr Sigman claims that more than half of three-year-olds have televisions in their bedrooms and that a quarter of Britain's five-year-olds have their own computer. He suggests that those with a screen in their bedroom are less likely to be able to read by the age of six and that early viewing leads to more time spent with televisions and computers in later life.

He added: "These statistics should prompt us to consider a policy to, in effect, cordon off the early years of child development, providing a buffer zone from so much electronic media. The sheer age at which children start their viewing careers... should cause all of us to stop and reflect."

(Telegraph, 7 February 2008)

The Guardian has covered a study of 700 children over 20 years, which has found that 14-year-olds who watched more than three hours of TV a day were more likely to develop learning problems. It also found that they were twice as likely not to continue education post-16 as children who watched less than an hour a day. The researchers, from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, think that too much TV makes other activities such as reading and homework boring and challenging. The average British 11- to 15-year-old spends seven and a half hours a day in front of a screen.

(Guardian, 8 May 2007)

West warned of creeping illiteracy due to ICT

The TES has reported that “suburban illiteracy” caused by children discarding books for the internet and DVDs is affecting affluent countries. Speaking at a Unesco literacy summit, Dr James Reardon-Anderson said that preserving reading should be top priority for teachers in the West. He added that the use of TV and videos in the classroom instead of books was exacerbating the problem. This is resulting in students arriving at university lacking basic literacy skills and not being sufficiently well read.

However, Unesco are calling for a broader conception of literacy, which would include the ability to critique TV and radio.

(TES, 30 March 2007)

TV generation shows decay of oral language skills

The Telegraph reports that the influence of television programmes has created a generation of children unable to express themselves. Astudy by Professor Tony McEnery, a linguistic specialist from Lancaster University analysed 10 million words of transcribed speech, 10,000 words from teenagers' internet blogs and interviews with 200 youngsters for the study.

The report said children's narrow vocabulary was making many unemployable and called for schools to teach young people better verbal communication skills. Prof. McEnery told the Telegraph: "It could well be that as the 'TV generations' grow up a serious decay of oral language skills, including vocabulary, will become a key issue in education."

(Telegraph, 13 December 2006)

Radio Five Live's monthly book club launches

The Bookseller has reported that Five Live's Simon Mayo programme has launched its own book club, Five Live Book of the Month, providing a platform for new British writers. Presenter Simon Mayo has included books in his shows since joining the station in 2001. He hosts his informal "book panel" on Thursday's, discussing a wide range of books, which is a reflection of Mayo's genuine passion for books. With an average of 1.3 million Simon Mayo listeners every day from 1 to 5pm. The organisers of Five Live Book of the Month will also issue toolkits for retailers and libraries to promote shortlisted and winning titles.

(Bookseller, 27 October 2006)

The Telegraph has reported that parents who say they are too busy to read to their children should let them watch television- but only with the sub-titles on, a literacy expert has said. Jim Trelease said parents of children over the age of eight should turn off the sound so their child can only understand its favourite programme by reading the text on screen. In the case of younger children, the sound should be left on so the child can see the words it hears.

(Telegraph, 19 October 2006)

Headmaster confiscates pupils' TVs and computers

The Telegraph has profiled a headteacher who has raised standards at his school by confiscating computers and television sets from the homes of under-performing pupils. Duncan Harper, the head of New Woodlands school in south London, visits the homes of pupils who are tired or grumpy in lessons and, with parental permission, seizes electronic equipment from their bedroom. Mr Harper said that academic results and behaviour have improved markedly since he introduced the "seizure policy".

(Telegraph, 7 June 2006)

The Times covered a study by the University of Chicago which suggested that pre-schoolers who watch TV fare marginally better at school than those who do not. Professor Matthew Gentzkow and Dr Jesse Shapiro noted that children who watch less tend to come from richer families, and so may enjoy advantages (better schooling, say) that also affect their educational achievement.

To try to straighten out this skewing factor, they looked to history to see if the arrival of TV in America in the late 1940s was followed by a nationwide drop in educational attainment. Shortly after TVs introduction, American pre-schoolers watched an average of three to four hours a day. The economists studied the scores of more than 300,000 students who sat tests in 1965. The students were aged 11, 14 or 17, and were born during the period of TV's introduction (1948 to 1954). So, within each age group, some had spent their pre-school years watching TV and some hadn't. The researchers concluded that test scores were unaffected.

Gentzkow and Shapiro said pre-schoolers who watched TV performed marginally better at school, particularly in reading and general knowledge. This finding persisted even when researchers corrected for other factors that influence test scores: school quality, income and urban deprivation. The young watchers who gained most were: non-whites; those in households where English was not the first language; and those with poorly educated mothers.

The message is that rather than TV-watching being intrinsically good or bad, its impact depends on what other activities are crowded out. The researchers studied this point in more detail by seeing whether children were read to by their parents; those who were never read to benefited most from TV. Pre-schoolers whose parents read regularly performed slightly worse, though the drop in test score was not statistically significant.

The "crowding out" hypothesis of TV's effects finds support in a study by the University of Texas at Austin, Zero to Six: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers and Preschoolers, which found a link between TV and reading. In "heavy TV" households (where it is switched on most of the time), 24% of children aged two and over could read; in other homes the figure was 36%.

(The Times, 11 April 2006)

TV is not cause of attention deficit in children

The Guardian reported that young children do not develop hyperactivity and attention problems by spending hours in front of television sets, according to a study by psychologists. Their findings overturn research from 2004 that suggested prolonged television viewing among children could lead to a range of behavioural problems, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The study followed two groups of 2,500 children whose television viewing habits were recorded over a two-year period, from the moment they left nursery school at age five to the end of their first year in primary school. The researchers found that the number of hours of television the children watched had no bearing on their risk of having ADHD later.

(Guardian, 7 March 2006)

See: Research claims infants weaned on TV 'cannot concentrate'

The TES reported on research from Sheffield University which showed that television can be a positive force in the lives of the pre-schoolers. Dr Jackie Marsh surveyed the parents of almost 2,000 young children and found them overwhelmingly positive about the role of TV in their children's lives. Dr Marsh said: "All too often people assume that children's use of media and new technologies is unhealthy ... but they can teach vital life and social skills."

Dr Marsh asked pre-school organisations to try activities based on TV characters. One said: "Just having Batman logos on the top of paper was enough... The boys couldn't write enough, whereas when we usually put paper out, they ignore it."

Digital Beginnings: Young Children's Use of Popular Culture, Media and New Technologies. See www.digitalbeginnings.shef.ac.uk

(TES, 11 November 2005)

The Daily Mail reported on three seperate studies which show the damage TV can cause:

The first study, by the John Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and Stanford University of 400 eight and nine-year-olds, which discovered that those with bedside television sets did worse in maths, reading and language tests than those without their own TV. It is thought that lack of sleep caused by watching television in bed late into the night may be to blame for the pupils' poor performance. However, having a home computer had the opposite effect. Those with access to one scored around six points more in maths and language tests and four points more in reading tests.

The second study, by the University of Washington in Seattle, looked at the maths and reading abilities of almost 2,000 children. It found that television viewing among under-threes seemed to harm learning ability, concluding that toddlers learned far better when they actively took part in word and number games.

The third study, on around 1,000 children in New Zealand aged five, seven, nine, 11, 13 and 15, found that those who watched the most television were least likely to leave school with qualifications and less likely to obtain a university degree. It concluded: "The results of this study indicate that increased time spent watching television during childhood and adolescence was associated with a lower level of educational attainment by early adulthood."

(Daily Mail, 5 July 2005)

The Mirror reported the NOP World survey of 30,000 people across 30 industrialised nations, which found that in 2005 Britons spent 18 hours a week in front of the television and only 5 hours, 18 minutes reading. The French spent 17 hours, 18 minutes each week watching TV but others around the continent watch far less TV - with Sweden the lowest on 12 hours, 18 minutes; Italy just in front on 14 hours, 54 minutes and Germans viewing for 15 hours, 12 minutes.

The French read for 6 hours, 54 minutes a week, the Spanish for 5 hours, 48 minutes and the Germans for 5 hours, 42 minutes. India has the world's most avid readers. They spend 10 hours, 42 minutes each week with some from of publication in front of them.

(Mirror, 16 June 2005)

Steven Johnson from The Times reports on the positive side of 'dumbing-down':

"Popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past 30 years. Where most commentators assume a race-to-the-bottom and a dumbing down, I see a progressive story: mass culture growing more sophisticated, demanding more cognitive engagement with each passing year.

"We need a society that places less emphasis on the message conveyed by that entertainment and more on the work our brain has to do to interpret it. Pop culture is not necessarily more entertaining than before, nor have its moral lessons grown more profound. But it is making us smarter. Most of what we casually dismiss as junk culture has been steadily increasing the intellectual demands placed on the audience."

(The Times, 13 May 2005)

Reuters covered a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation which studied how much time children spend with television and other media in the US. It was based on classroom questionnaires given to more than 2,000 schoolchildren in Grades 3 to 13. The study found that children who reported spending the most time with their parents were also the ones who reported watching the most television. "Perhaps that's how kids and their parents spend time together," said the report.

Fears that electronic media would rob children of more old-fashioned skills seem unfounded, the report found. "In a typical day, nearly three out of four (73%) of young people report reading for pleasure," the report reads, "on average, eight to 18-year-olds spend about three-quarters of an hour a day reading. Interestingly, those young people who spend the most time watching TV (the 20% who watch more than five hours a day) don't report spending any less time reading than other young people do; and those who spend the most time playing console video games spend more time reading than those who play fewer video games."

(Reuters, 9 March 2005)

The Bookseller has covered a The Reading Agency and BBC Radio partnership to encourage book lending and reading. The partnership will see public libraries working together with BBC Radio 4 and BBC 7 to "create excitement about reading and serve readers better". A one-year pilot will determine the best ways to link library users and BBC radio resources. Ventures already in development include listening posts in libraries connected to BBC radio programmes featuring authors and book discussions, and persuading library users to contribute to BBC radio book programmes. There is also a plan to link BBC 7's digital children's programming to libraries' Summer Reading Challenge online.

(Bookseller, 12 November 2004)

The Guardian has covered a report in the journal Pediatrics by Dimitri Christakis of the Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Centre in Seattle. The parents of 1,345 children were questioned about their children's viewing habits and asked to rate their behaviour at the age of seven on a scale similar to that used to diagnose attention deficit disorder.

The children who watched the most television were more likely to rank in the top 10% for concentration problems, impulsiveness, restlessness and being easily confused. Each additional hour of viewing increased the child's likelihood of having attention problems by about 10%. Previous studies have examined the amount of television children watch but this was the first to link it to attention disorders.

(Guardian, 6 April 2004)

See: TV is not cause of attention deficit in children

Teens see no link between education and success

The TES has covered a study which shows the importance of celebrity role models. Teenagers increasingly believe there is no link between their achievements in school and their potential to succeed because of the careers of football stars and reality TV celebrities. The problem, dubbed "realism deficiency" or "Beckham syndrome", was noted by researchers acting on behalf of the South West Learning and Skills Council.

Jane Samuel, a spokeswoman for the South West LSC, said: "The biggest group did not see the link between education and success. It could be seen as Fame Academy or Pop Idol syndrome because there was an expectation that you would become a winner overnight."

(TES, 16 January 2004)