Group items tagged

There are other studies that support the theory that watching television does decrease literacy. In 1976, the National Assessment of Education Progress found that teenagers who watched three hours of television the night before an exam scored significantly lower than those who watched less than 60 minutes of television. (Hornik 195) The students who watched three hours of television scored a 59% compared to the 69% of the ones who only watched one hour. (Hornik 195) The number themselves are not striking; however, the similarities with the homework are more surprising. The same group of teenagers scored a 58.5% when they did not do homework and a 72% when they had done homework. This shows an interesting relationship between time spent watching television and time spent in academic studies. The National Assement study gives credibility to the displacement hypothesis. Two other studies observed similar effects. The California State Department of Education conducted a study in 1980, that showed that television caused a "relatively sharp decline on mathematics, reading, and written expression examinations at both the 6th and 12th grade levels". (Hornik 195) The second study conducted by Morgan and Gross found correlation between television hours with each reading ,mathematics, and language competencies. The study found correlations of -0.20 for the sixth through ninth graders that participated. (Hornik) The important point in the past studies is that television affects not only literacy but also mathematics, and language skills. This is the strongest evidence yet that supports the displacement theory, along with the Alwin and Hall studies this is the strongest evidence yet for the displacement theory.

Some social critics are of the opinion that the spread of the electronic media is destroying literacy. Standardized test scores of reading and writing ability have in fact gone down in recent years. Are the new media the main cause?

the number of hours spent watching television declines as the education levels of viewers rise, but education-related differences in the amount of television use are not large and they have been narrowing

Volti notes that Marshall McLuhan was of the opinion that television affected viewers by requiring they use all their senses, that viewing television was not like reading, which is linear. Television is less concerned with sequence than reading.

Since the first television screens lit up our living rooms scientists have been studying its affect on young children. Now scientists have compared mother-child communication while watching TV to reading books or playing with toys to reveal the impact on children's development. The results show that watching TV can lead to less interaction between parents and children, with a detrimental impact on literacy and language skills.

The team found that when reading a book with their children parents used a more active communication style, bringing the child into contact with words they may not hear in every day speech, thereby improving their vocabulary and grammatical knowledge. In contrast watching TV resulted in significantly fewer descriptions and positive responses than mothers playing with toys. "Reading books together increased the maternal communication beyond a level required for reading, while watching TV decreased maternal communication. This is significant when we consider the amount of time young children spend watching TV. In some cases children are left alone to watch TV, missing out on any parental communication at a critical stage in their development," concluded Nathanson.

"Studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary," Greenfield said. "Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades."

Another study Greenfield analyzed found that college students who watched "CNN Headline News" with just the news anchor on screen and without the "news crawl" across the bottom of the screen remembered significantly more facts from the televised broadcast than those who watched it with the distraction of the crawling text and with additional stock market and weather information on the screen.   These and other studies show that multi-tasking "prevents people from getting a deeper understanding of information," Greenfield said.

Visual intelligence has been rising globally for 50 years, Greenfield said. In 1942, people's visual performance, as measured by a visual intelligence test known as Raven's Progressive Matrices, went steadily down with age and declined substantially from age 25 to 65. By 1992, there was a much less significant age-related disparity in visual intelligence, Greenfield said.   "In a 1992 study, visual IQ stayed almost flat from age 25 to 65," she said.   Greenfield believes much of this change is related to our increased use of technology, as well as other factors, including increased levels of formal education, improved nutrition, smaller families and increased societal complexity.

However, our dependency on technology can also make us lazy. Why bother to strain our eyes reading when the television will tell us about important occurrences and entertain us? Why write a letter when your family member or friend can be talked to directly over the telephone? Avoiding the practice of certain literacies will eventually lower the level of one's literacy. To avoid decreasing levels of literacy caused by technology certain precautions must be taken.

Raskin argues this point and also states that computers as teachers may be a bad idea. Students may never acquire adequate social skills and also may not learn efficiently if computers are the main sources of instruction. Ogbu writes that minorities may have a disadvantage in educational institutions. Because technology can be used in classrooms more often there is more potential for inequality. The schools with more resources will be able to offer students more technology and an even better education. Technology can damage education and literacy

Hirsch says that in order to be culturally literate one only needs to know a certain amount of specific ideas. If there are 5,000 ideas that when known are adequate for understanding a culture then if it were easy to look up these 5,000 ideas on demand the culture would be understood. Raskin proposes that a computer could store a list of these ideas along with descriptions making "it easy for an uncultured person encountering one of the expressions to look it up in the database and get the general picture" ( Raskin, p. 202). Hirsch believes that schools provide the common background, but if a database of cultural references existed then schools would not need teach what the students already have easy access to. The schools could teach the students how to use the database and the students would never need to become culturally literate

Frequent users of smartphones quickly get used to the “auto-complete” function of their devices—the way they need only type a few letters and the phone fills in the rest. Maybe too used to it, in fact. This handy function seems to make adolescent users faster, but less accurate, when responding to a battery of cognitive tests, according to research published in 2009 in the journal Bioelectromagnetics.

A study led by researchers at the University of Coventry in Britain surveyed a group of eight- to twelve-year-olds about their texting habits, then asked them to write a sample text in the lab. The scientists found that kids who sent three or more text messages a day had significantly lower scores on literacy tests than children who sent none

The ready availability of search engines is changing the way we use our memories, reported psychologist Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University in a study published in Science last year. When people expect to have future access to information, Sparrow wrote, “they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it.” It’s good to know where to find the information you need—but decades of cognitive science research shows that skills like critical thinking and problem-solving can be developed only in the context of factual knowledge. In other words, you’ve got to have knowledge stored in your head, not just in your computer.

Back in the day there was this book entitled “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.” It was published in 1988 and was written by E.D. Hirsch, Jr. Moi liked the concept, some others, not so much. “Cultural Literacy” is defined by Education. Com: Having sufficient common knowledge, i.e., educational background, experiences, basic skills, and training, to function competently in a given society (the greater the level of comprehension of the given society’s habits, attitudes, history, etc., the higher the level of cultural literacy)

Middle school students who frequently use “tech-speak”—omitting letters to shorten words and using homophone symbols, such as @ for “at” or 2nite for “tonight”—performed worse on a test of basic grammar, according to a new study in New Media & Society.

Drew P. Cingel, a doctoral candidate in media, technology, and society at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., conducted the experiment when he was an undergraduate with the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State University in University Park, Pa. under director S. Shyam Sundar. The researchers surveyed 228 6th, 7th, and 8th graders in central Pennsylvania on their daily habits, including the number of texts they sent and received, their attitudes about texting, and their other activities during the day, such as watching television or reading for pleasure. The researchers then assessed the students using 22 questions adapted from a 9th-grade grammar test to include only topics taught by 6th grade, including verb/noun agreement, use of correct tense, homophones, possessives, apostrophes, comma usage, punctuation, and capitalization.

Literacy has been under siege for some time. The supposed agents of this threat have changed over the years but the perception remains constant. Television, movies, video games, mobile phones, and the Internet have all been identified as the culprits that rot the brain, desensitize, delude, and generally ruin the minds of the young (and perhaps everyone else too). At the core of much of this concern is the perceived decline of literacy. One of the most passionate and eloquent commentators on this decline and its impact is Chris Hedges. In Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009), he notes, “The illiterate, the semiliterate, and those who live as though they are illiterate are effectively cut off from the past. They live in an eternal present.”

This “eternal present” is comprised of “comforting, reassuring images, fantasies, slogans, celebrities, and a lust for violence.” It is a world devoid of substance, dislocated from history, reflection, and nuance. The media and popular press point clearly to new technologies as the cause of this decline but also, ironically, as the source of the “new literacy.” Texting, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and countless other technologies and media are widely seen as undermining or displacing literacy. Not so. They are certainly changing our relationship with literacy and altering what it means to be literate in a ubiquitous multimedia world. But all these things are intimately linked to literacy.

So it turns out that most new technologies and media are not threatening literacy but in fact enhancing it. As a result these are not the tools and capacities that will displace literacy; they are much more likely to be sources for the defense of literacy. While they may be easy targets for the luddites, none of these technologies has exhibited a capacity sufficiently powerful to displace literacy or even create a substantive new literacy. In fact, most are based on a foundation of conventional literacy. The Internet is the largest, most comprehensive information resource ever assembled. It represents the triumph of literacy not its demise. These technologies are not candidates for post-literacy. A replacement for literacy will require a greater level of capability and capacity than that of these relatively primitive technologies.

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

At least since the invention of television, critics have warned that electronic media would destroy reading.

Some traditionalists warn that digital reading is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories. Often, they argue, writers on the Internet employ a cryptic argot that vexes teachers and parents. Zigzagging through a cornucopia of words, pictures, video and sounds, they say, distracts more than strengthens readers. And many youths spend most of their time on the Internet playing games or sending instant messages, activities that involve minimal reading at best.