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TV and its Negative Impact on Literacy SkillsOverviewTV and Early DevelopmentReading and Brain DevelopmentNegative Effects on Adolescence Social SkillsPreparation for Post-Education EmploymentImpacts on adulthoodVideo: Effect of Television on Young ChildrenSourcesAccording to a study in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent PsychiatryWatching three or more hours of TV a day leads to:Poor homework completionNegative attitudes towards schoolBad gradesPoor performance in college16% of 8th graders and 22% of 12th graders have not mastered basic writing.Only 3% of 8th and 6% of 12th graders read at the "advanced" level.Students are unprepared for more advanced classesChildren who watch more TV are less likely to read.Children who don't read before age 8 are much less likely to start reading later in life.This leaves them unprepared for high amounts of reading and writing in high school and college courses.Students who read show much better grasp of writing skills than those who don't - skills that are necessary for advancement later in higher level classes and in the professional world.Adolescents who watch excessive amounts of TV often lack simple, yet necessary social skills.Passive interaction with TV leads to less interaction with peers and parentsVital social and communicative skills are slow to develop, or never develop at all.Reading and the BrainReading forces the mind to translate words on a page into images in the mind. The brain has to develop its own images and ideas, triggering the development of imagination and creativity. This is called "active participation."TV, on the other hand, requires "passive participation." Television provides images for the brain, removing any need for imagination or creativity and drastically reducing a child's vocabulary, word recognition, and critical-thinking skills.

Employers are finding that the ability to write clearly, concisely and correctly among their workforce is becoming a rarer and rarer skill. And nearly everyone in the workplace is frustrated at how slowly they read and how little they remember.

In 2001, the American Management Association found that one-third of job applicants flunked basic literacy and math tests.

Employers view reading and writing as critical basic skills, yet they are often at a loss about how to improve those skills among their workforce without incurring huge costs and loss of on-the-job time

Little or no grammar teaching, cell phone texting, social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, are all being blamed for an increasingly unacceptable number of post-secondary students who can't write.

require the students they accept to pass an exam testing their English language skills. Almost a third of those students are failing.

Thirty per cent of students who are admitted are not able to pass at a minimum level,

As technology has played a bigger role in our lives, our skills in critical thinking and analysis have declined, while our visual skills have improved,

Reading for pleasure, which has declined among young people in recent decades, enhances thinking and engages the imagination in a way that visual media such as video games and television do not,

"If we want to develop a variety of skills, we need a balanced media diet

Out of 700 youth aged 12-17 who participated in the phone survey, 60 percent say they don't consider electronic communications - e-mail, instant messaging, mobile text - to be writing in the formal sense; 63 percent say it has no impact on the writing they do for school and 64 percent report inadvertently using some form of shorthand common to electronic text, including emotions, incorrect grammar or punctuation

to excuse bad writing by saying it's just how their world is now "is ignoring the fact that formal communication is still important and necessary."

Many struggle with the formal writing process

The picture emerging from the research is deeply troubling, at least to anyone who values the depth, rather than just the velocity, of human thought. People who read text studded with links, the studies show, comprehend less than those who read traditional linear text. People who watch busy multimedia presentations remember less than those who take in information in a more sedate and focused manner. People who are continually distracted by emails, alerts and other messages understand less than those who are able to concentrate. And people who juggle many tasks are less creative and less productive than those who do one thing at a time.

The common thread in these disabilities is the division of attention. The richness of our thoughts, our memories and even our personalities hinges on our ability to focus the mind and sustain concentration. Only when we pay deep attention to a new piece of information are we able to associate it "meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already well established in memory," writes the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel. Such associations are essential to mastering complex concepts. When we're constantly distracted and interrupted, as we tend to be online, our brains are unable to forge the strong and expansive neural connections that give depth and distinctiveness to our thinking. We become mere signal-processing units, quickly shepherding disjointed bits of information into and then out of short-term memory. In an article published in Science last year, Patricia Greenfield, a leading developmental psychologist, reviewed dozens of studies on how different media technologies influence our cognitive abilities. Some of the studies indicated that certain computer tasks, like playing video games, can enhance "visual literacy skills," increasing the speed at which people can shift their focus among icons and other images on screens. Other studies, however, found that such rapid shifts in focus, even if performed adeptly, result in less rigorous and "more automatic" thinking.

In one experiment conducted at Cornell University, for example, half a class of students was allowed to use Internet-connected laptops during a lecture, while the other had to keep their computers shut. Those who browsed the Web performed much worse on a subsequent test of how well they retained the lecture's content. While it's hardly surprising that Web surfing would distract students, it should be a note of caution to schools that are wiring their classrooms in hopes of improving learning. Ms. Greenfield concluded that "every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others." Our growing use of screen-based media, she said, has strengthened visual-spatial intelligence, which can improve the ability to do jobs that involve keeping track of lots of simultaneous signals, like air traffic control. But that has been accompanied by "new weaknesses in higher-order cognitive processes," including "abstract vocabulary, mindfulness, reflection, inductive problem solving, critical thinking, and imagination." We're becoming, in a word, shallower.

a number of international surveys have raised alarms that the United States is falling behind other countries in terms of educational achievement

In basic literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving skills, the new study shows, younger Americans are at or near the bottom of the standings among advanced countries

The United States scored 260.9, which put it second to last, above Italy

Some 95% of teens ages 12-17 are online, 76% use social networking sites, and 77% have cell phones. Moreover, 96% of those ages 18-29 are internet users, 84% use social networking sites, and 97% have cell phones.

Nearly 20 million of the 225 million Twitter users follow 60 or more Twitter accounts and nearly 2 million follow more than 500 accounts.

YouTube users upload 60 hours of video per minute and they triggered more than 1 trillion playbacks in 2011 – roughly 140 video views per person on earth.