A paper is being published by the National Bureau of Economic Research that contains a careful study of the correlations between students' use of their time and academic achievement. It also carries a detailed dissection of the use of two statistical methods to examine the raw data produced during the study. But, in the end, it will probably go down in history based on the headlines it generates, which are likely to be along the lines of "Video games hurt GPAs."
The researchers involved, a father-son team, were actually curious about an extremely basic and important issue: does time spent studying actually make a difference when the report cards come out? Despite a large number of studies on items that influence academic achievement, the authors say, "knowledge of the causal impact of the most fundamental input in the education production function—students’ own study time and effort—has remained essentially nonexistent."
The study sets out to provide some of that knowledge by leveraging some unique characteristics of the institution where one of them teaches, Berea College. Berea randomly assigns freshman roomates, eliminating a major factor in self-selected environmental influences for students. It has a mandatory class attendance policy, which helps ensure equal exposure to academic material; it also requires 10 hours of work-study effort from students while prohibiting outside jobs. Finally, it's a religious school in a dry county, meaning late-night drinking has less of an impact on academics than it probably does on many other campuses. Demographic history, grades, and a dozen time-use surveys were given to a cohort of 210 individuals in an incoming freshman class at Berea to provide the data for the study.
With the most obvious time sinks eliminated, the study needed an external factor that influenced study time. It found it in video games, specifically by dividing the students based on whether their roommates had brought gaming rigs to school. About half of the males and a quarter of the females fell into this group. But the impact of access to gaming didn't depend on the students' gender: those with video games in their rooms spent about two-thirds of an hour less on academic work per day out of a mean of 3.5 hours of study time. That decrease closely tracked the amount of time that the students reported spending gaming, suggesting that there was a direct transfer of effort between the two activities.
With an independent variable in hand, the authors turned to the student grades, adjusting them for demographics and past achievement. The males with access to games saw their GPAs drop by 0.24 points, while coeds whose roommates came with gaming rigs took a 0.13 hit. That allowed the authors to calculate the impact of studying, with an hour per day producing a mean GPA increase of 0.36 points. The authors appear satisfied that this provides an answer to a major question that lingers over their field.
Should gamers (or, more pertinently, those paying their tuition) be alarmed? One of the big learning experiences of college comes in the area of time management. At most institutions, gaming is just one of a very large list of items that compete to distract students from the academics at hand. This study suggests that the first lesson of time management should be that studying pays off, and time needs to be made for it.