Television's Impact on High School Achievement

Using data from the first two waves of the High School and Beyond project, this study examines the reciprocal relationship between media use and academic achievement among American high school students. The hypothesis of the study was that TV influences achievement negatively as it displaces other, more beneficial activities, but that reading influences achievement positively, particularly reading skills. It was also hypothesized that achievement influences media use: specifically, achievement negatively influences television use and positively influences reading. The study used multiple regression in a cross-lagged model. No clear evidence of negative effects of TV on achievement were found. TV, however, was found to be relatively less beneficial than reading for pleasure. And while achievement's influence on the amount of TV viewing was not supported, reading achievement does seem to influence the amount reading. Gary D. Gaddy is an Assistant Professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and Research Associate in the Mass Communication Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This article is based on the author's doctoral dissertation done at the School of Journalism, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An earlier version of this study was presented at the 40th Annual Conference of AAPOR, McAfee, NJ, May 1985. The author would like to acknowledge the substantial contributions of many individuals to this work, especially Jane D. Brown, Rachel Rosenfeld, Eli Rubinstein, Duncan McRae, Jr., Lutz Erbring, Tom Flory, Al Schubert, Gary Pettey, Zena and Frank Biocca, and Doris Graber. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 50:340-359 K 1986 by the Amerncan Association for Public Opinion Research Published by The University of Chicago Press 0033-362X/86/0050-340/$2.50 This content downloaded from 157.55. 39.116 on Thu, 02 Mar 2017 05:52:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor. org/terms TV'S IMPACT ON HIGH SCHOOL ACHIEVEMENT 341 rest by the parallel findings of two major studies of television and children: Himmelweit et al. (1958) in England, and Schramm, et al. (1961) in America. Both studies found some differences in achievement in favor of children without TV, but they were either statistically insignificant or counterbalanced by other significant differences in favor of children with TV. A review of the early studies indicates that, although the evidence was weak, the research did suggest that negative effects existed, though on a smaller scale than was first supposed. So, despite-or perhaps because of-the lack of any conclusive evidence, the issue fell dormant. It may be that such benign neglect could be justified in the warm glow of reports of the continually rising national test scores throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. After all, how could television be so bad when its introduction was followed by almost two decades of academic progress (see Figure 1). 1 But with the reversal of this trend (see Copperman, 1980), particularly the unprecedented drop in national Scholastic Aptitude Test score averages, the issue was rekindled. A minor irony in this turnabout is that television was raised as a possible contributing factor in this decline by one of the same researchers who had 15 years earlier helped lay it to rest (Schramm, 1976). Apparently spurred by this downturn, research on the role of television revived. More recent and generally more sophisticated studies have garnered evidence that television may indeed slow cognitive growth (e.g., Hornik, 1978; Gadberry, 1980). This revival has stimulated several examinations of the state of research itself. While early reviews (e.g., Finn, 1953; Coffin, 1955) were generally inconclusive, more recent summaries (Hornik, 1981; Morgan and Gross, 1982; Comstock, 1982) all support, to varying degrees, the existence of a negative impact of television on achievement. The only clearly dissenting view from this new consensus comes in the form of a news release from an agency of the television industry (Television Information Office, 1982), which appears extremely selective in its reading of the evidence (see Gaddy, 1984: 6-7). The Process of Effects While the accumulating evidence suggests a causal effect of television on achievement, the process by which such an effect might take 1 Figure 1 is misleading if it suggests no substantial changes in performance between 1950 and 1965, since during that period the percentage of students taking the test increased from 9 percent to 55 percent. Without overall progress, this increase is likely to have led to a substantial decline in mean scores. This content downloaded from 157.55. 39.116 on Thu, 02 Mar 2017 05:52:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor. org/terms