008: Screen Time - What The Research Says
One of the topics we know is a real concern for parents and teachers when it comes to technology is the question of “Screen Time”, and that is perhaps more an issue than ever with schools forced to move online to deliver education during the current school closures.
This is also special episode for us because our new book, ‘Integrating Technology: A School-Wide Framework to Enhance Learning’, has just come out. In it we dedicated half an entire chapter to explaining the research about screen time and what it means for teaching with technology. In this episode and in the post below we are sharing that excerpt with you here as a sneak peek - we hope you enjoy it!
Integrating Technology: A School-Wide Framework to Enhance Learning
Chapter 2: The Research on Technology in Education
Excerpt - Screen Time
Screen time, as a phrase, is almost exclusively used in a negative context, primarily in news reports raising alarm over the dangers and risks posed to children’s physical and social well-being from time spent on digital devices. In recent years a belief has developed that either all screen time is inherently bad for children, or there is a set amount of screen time that is safe for children, above which they will suffer harm. The problems with these beliefs are that they suggest that all children of all ages have the same needs and vulnerabilities (they do not) and that all screen time is the same (it is not). As a society we use the term screen time to encompass so much, yet it means so little: screen time can mean watching TV or writing a book. Even “watching TV” can mean watching a violent movie or something with flashing lights, loud music, and a frenetic pace, or it can mean watching Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, or Blue Planet. Trying to draw conclusions about all screen time for all children is impossible, because there are too many variables in both the screens and the children.
So, how do we make sense of the research and stories we are reading, and how do we make responsible decisions about screen time in our homes and classrooms for the benefit of our children?
There are three factors we need to consider when we read and think about screen time: the age of the child, what is happening on the screen, and what is not happening while the child is using the screen.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) released a policy statement in 2016 titled “Media and Young Minds,” which summarized the research into the effects of time spent using digital media on infants through five-year-old children and laid out recommendations for the quantity and type of screen time for children in this age bracket. The AAP advised parents that children under two should ideally have no screen time (apart from video chatting with relatives with parental guidance) and that children between two and five years of age should limit screen time to one hour per day. It also advised that when children are allowed screen time, it should be with high-quality educational apps or TV programs that are not too fast paced, and it should end at least an hour before bedtime. This is because the brains of babies and young children are in a critical phase of development where poor-quality or excessive use of screens can do real damage. As children age, and their cognitive development changes, the risks and potential rewards of screen time change, and the guidelines for safe time limits increase.
However, it is important that we recognize that we simply cannot reduce all time spent looking at a screen down to a single concept of screen time. Reading an e-book is self- evidently different in terms of potential gains and risks than playing a game, and even the risks and rewards of game playing depend greatly on the quality and purpose of the game. Can we really say that reading a book on a screen is less valuable than reading a book on paper, simply because of the medium? Is the time spent playing a collaborative problem- solving game on a screen more or less antisocial than the time spent reading a book alone? And when we see headlines that suggest screen time causes terrifying problems for our children and students, such as cancer, obesity, diabetes, or language delays, what are we to make of those headlines?
Well, the key behind understanding the headlines and what they mean for educational technology use is threefold:
if possible, read the research the news article is based on,
bear in mind that correlation does not equal causation (more on this shortly), and
remember that headlines need to be significantly more interesting and dramatic than the research they are based on tends to be!
Take, for example, this very alarming tabloid headline: “Switch Off: Kids Who Spend Too Much Time Staring at Screens ‘at Greater Risk of 12 Deadly Cancers’” (McDermott 2018). While the headline infers that technology is the cause of the issue, the World Cancer Research Fund (2018) report on which the article is based makes it clear that the technology itself is not causing cancer. Rather, it says, obesity and weight gain are the true danger factors in determining increased cancer risks, and it draws a correlation between screen time, exposure to junk food advertising, and sedentary lifestyles as risk factors for these issues. This might seem a subtle distinction, but it is a crucial one. If we fail to understand the true cause of the issue (junk food, advertising, and insufficient exercise), simply “switching off,” as the headline commands, won’t necessarily help. We need to know what the true issues are so we can take proactive steps to address or avoid them when helping kids manage their social time and meals.
We see this oversimplification repeated time and time again in headlines about screen time, and it comes down to one simple fact: correlation does not equal causation. While screen time might be a risk factor for what it indicates about a child’s wider behaviors, it has never been shown to be the cause of the kinds of negative impacts that parents and teachers are rightly so concerned about.
What we think is finally being made very clear in some research (Orben and Przybylski 2019)—but much less clear in the news as yet—is this: screens themselves, and even what is on them, generally, are not the true cause of harm. Simply looking at screens is not harmful to school-aged children; screens are just things.
What is harmful is missing out on the activities they aren’t doing because they are using screens and the influences they are exposed to through the screen, such as junk food advertising.
The AAP’s report makes it clear that young children who spend hours watching TV or playing games on iPads are missing out on face-to-face, hands-on play and communication time that is crucial to their development. For older children and teenagers this is just as applicable in different ways. When screen time takes the place of regular dinner- time family conversation, that is harmful to children. When screen time takes the place of regular exercise, fresh air, or social interaction, that is harmful to children. When screen time takes the place of high-quality teaching—opportunities to think critically, be creative, solve problems, and collaborate in the classroom—that is harmful to children.
Click to visit the Heinemann website and find out more about the book
This means that we need to take a balanced and deliberate approach to technology’s use in the classroom. Screens should never take the place of high-quality teaching; they should enrich it, based on student need. Digital worksheets, online drills, chatting, and surfing the Internet are rarely valuable uses of students’ time, and simply going one-to-one (one device per student) without a vision for technology’s role in education is an approach that runs the risk of being more about screen time than learning time.
When technology is integrated in a purpose-based, deliberate way, the mind-set, curriculum, pedagogy, resourcing, and leadership work together so that technology is never replacing teaching or high-quality learning time; it is enhancing it.
The Research About Screen Time
Przybylski and Weinstein (2019) Digital Screen time limits and young children’s psychological well-being: Evidence from a population-based study
In this article Przybylski and Weinstein wanted to know if the revised American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations for screen time had a significant impact on children's wellbeing. In 2010 the AAP issued a recommendation that children aged 2-5 should have less than 2 hours per day of screen time. This was then revised in 2016 to less than 1 hour per day of screen time. And the question is, does this revised recommendation have an impact on a child’s wellbeing?
The researchers defined a child’s wellbeing as:
Showing curiosity
Resilience or the ability to respond adaptively to challenges and stressors
Attachment to caregiver
Maintaining a positive affect
Positive growth in these four areas was considered a predictor of healthy development in early childhood.
19,957 interviews with caregivers of children aged 2-5 years old were conducted. The data from these interviews was analyzed and in short there was no statistically significant relationship between the amount of screen time and children’s well being whether that be less than 2 hours per day or less than 1 hour per day.
“Findings suggested that there is little or no support for harmful links between digital screen use and young children’s psychological well-being.”(p.e61)
The study goes on to conclude that screens may impact other areas of a child’s health (sleep quality, somatic health, peer relationships, etc.) and that more rigorous investigation needs to be conducted because digital screens are widely used by young people and children world wide. The paper states “Whether engaged through computers, tablets or smartphones, or televisions, digital screens, despite controversy, will remain a fixture of modern childhood (Houghton et al., 2015).
Given that this digital genie cannot be put back in the bottle, it is incumbent on researchers to identify the mechanisms by and extent to which exposure to these screens might influence children.” (p.62)
Orben A., & Przybylski, A.K. (2019) ‘The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use’
This paper was one of the first major publications to really address the issue of why the previous research around whether technology use is harmful for adolescents is difficult to draw firm conclusions from.
First, the authors explain where the data used to infer findings about screen time usually comes from. Most of it comes from large data sets like household panel surveys, or other data sets where the aim was to assess general psychological well-being, just adding in technology use as a factor. The problem is, that most of the findings from these large data sets have been inconclusive or contradictory. Some have found very small negative correlations, others have found no evidence at all linking technology to negative outcomes.
So, why aren’t these data sets helpful?
There are three reasons:
Large scale surveys, conducted by post, phone interview, or face to face interview need to be accessible and broad enough for the general public to respond to. As a result, the questions and scales used are often simplified to make it easier for participants. They also tend to combine scales and measures from multiple disciplines (social, clinical, psychological etc), which means that researchers have to make numerous decisions about how to combine and analyze the responses and data and where researchers are making decisions about what to include, what to leave out, and how much importance to attribute to various measures, there is a lot of potential for subjectivity and differing outcomes.
The second issue is scale. When you have data sets ranging from 5,000 to 5,000,000 responses, even a very small percentage of respondents who say that, for example, looking at social media makes them sad, actually adds up to hundreds or thousands of people. So that can make a very tiny finding appear statistically significant, when really it isn’t.
Finally we have the issue, as we mentioned in our excerpt, of causation vs correlation. What that means is that these large, cross-sectional data sets can only observe that something is happening, not why it is happening. As a simple example they might find that there is a correlation (a link) between teenage social media use and increased sadness. But what it can’t tell us is whether they were sad because they used social media, or they used social media because they were sad.
The researchers of this paper used three large scale data sets (Monitoring the Future (MTF), Youth Risk and Behavior Survey (YRBS) and Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) from the United States of
America (MTF, YRBS) and the United Kingdom (MCS), and used something called specification curve analysis (SCA) to analyze those datasets more thoroughly and objectively. For those who are interested, the researchers explain that:
“SCA is a tool for mapping the sum of theory-driven analytical decisions that could justifiably have been taken when analyzing quantitative data. Researchers demarcate every possible analytical pathway and then calculate the results of each. Rather than reporting a handful of analyses in their paper, they report all results of all theoretically defensible analyses.” p.174
This approach removes the subjective element listed as problem 1 above.
They also took a broader view of the data available through these surveys: rather than only focusing on what the data says about technology use on adolescent well-being, they also looked at and compared what it said about other effects on adolescent well-being from factors such as sleep, illicit drug use, and even eating potatoes.
What the researchers found was that while there was a small negative association with technology use and adolescent well-being, it was much smaller than the negative associations of bullying, marijuana use, and that the positive effects of getting enough sleep and eating breakfast more than neutralize any negative impact technology has. They even found that eating potatoes had almost the same level of negative association for well-being, whilst wearing glasses was more negatively associated that technology use.
In the researchers’ own words:
“With this in mind, the evidence simultaneously suggests that the effects of technology might be statistically significant but so minimal that they hold little practical value. The nuanced picture provided by these results is in line with previous psychological and epidemiological research suggesting that the associations between digital screen-time and child outcomes are not as simple as many might think.”
They finish up by saying that their research, (and, I would suggest, all other research to that point) can’t yet answer the question of whether technology use has a direct negative impact on well-being. All it can do at this point is point out links between certain behaviors and certain outcomes, not whether those behaviors cause those outcomes. As they explain:
“We know very little about whether increased technology use might cause lower well-being, whether lower well-being might result in increased technology use or whether a third confounding factor underlies both.”
These two authors in particular have been publishing a lot in the last year or so on this topic, and we see their names coming up in both academic publishing and the media, which is great as it means we in the mainstream are finally hearing some more authoritative and balanced voices on screen time.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jun/21/screen-time-harm-to-children-is-unproven-say-experts
http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2019-10-22-moderate-use-screen-time-can-be-good-your-health-new-study-finds
In one of these articles, they talked about another recent publication, ‘Social media’s enduring effect on adolescent life satisfaction’ (2019) and said this:
“What did we find? Well, mostly nothing! In more than half of the thousands of statistical models we tested, we found nothing more than random statistical noise. In the remainder, we did find some small trends over time – these were mostly clustered in data provided by teenage girls. Decreases in satisfaction with school, family, appearance and friends presaged increased social media use, and increases in social media use preceded decreases in satisfaction with school, family, and friends. You can see then how, if you were determined to extract a story, you could cook up one about teenage girls and unhappiness.
But – and this is key – it’s not an exaggeration to say that these effects were minuscule by the standards of science and trivial if you want to inform personal parenting decisions. Our results indicated that 99.6% of the variability in adolescent girls’ satisfaction with life had nothing to do with how much they used social media”.
What to do in your classroom
Here are some tips and considerations:
1
Remember that the media is designed to grab your attention but scientific research is more nuanced than that. Be critical of news headlines and take time to read the research that is said to support the article.
2
Communicate with parents how technology is used within the classroom to support a balanced day for the child. The AAP gives some helpful recommendations about this:
Don’t have screens in a child’s bedroom
Caregivers and children should use digital media together, for supervision but also to facilitate more conversation and connection
The quality of digital screen time is important. Aim for high quality educational content, opportunities to create or think critically, and connect with others.
3
In your classroom, whether virtual or otherwise, aim to create learning engagements that require children to use technology in a way that stimulates creativity, enhances collaboration, diversified communication and/or requires critical thinking rather than passive consumption
4
Integrate technology when it is meaningful, and purposefully connects to the core learning of the lesson
And finally...
Speaking of meaningful and purposeful technology integration, you can find out more about our book on the Heinemann website and by listening to this episode of the Heinemann Podcast where we were on the other side of the mic!
If you want help and support with integrating technology meaningfully in your context, get in touch with us. We provide professional development workshops and consulting services in person and remotely.
Thanks for listening
Sarah and Katierose
Sources
Peer-reviewed
Orben A., & Przybylski, A.K. (2019) ‘The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use’
Przybylski, A., & Weinstein, N. (2019) Digital Screen time limits and young children’s psychological well-being: Evidence from a population-based study
