CO4820 Critical Analysis Assignment Sample
Module code and Title: CO4820 Critical Analysis Assignment Sample
Introduction
During this three-year study (2013–2016), researchers looked at variations in technology and interactive social media usage among 8th and 10th grade students in the United States. The total number of participants was 40,389 children. There were 40,389 eighth and tenth grade students that participated in the survey, which was conducted among a nationally representative sample of eighth and tenth grade students.
Females engage in interactive social media less often than men, while Black teens engage in most sorts of media more frequently than their peers of other races and ethnicities, according to the Pew Research Center. As an example, Asian teenagers report utilising the internet for educational reasons the most often of any race or ethnicity, with the exception of white adolescents (Dumas2020).
Background
Students who spent more time studying academic subjects during the week were found to have spent less time during their leisure time watching weekday television, playing video games, and conversing on the phone than those who spent more time doing other things during the week.
Teenagers with better grades are more likely than their peers to spend more time on computers for school and less time on other activities when it comes to technology and interactive social media sites like Facebook and Twitter (Toh,2019). According to the findings of a study of multivariate logistic regression results, viewing television during the workday has a negative influence on academic performance, but using a computer for schooling has a good impact on academic achievement, according to the findings (van Roekel2019).
Literature review
Research exploring whether gender, race/ethnicity, and technological and social media usage disparities are moderating variables in the link between media use and academic success is required. Currently, there is no research into this topic. An examination into the influence of gender on test results discovered that females’ online chatting and socialising in 8th grade was associated with lower test scores one year later, but that this was not the case for men’ online chatting and socialising in 8th grade, according to the findings.
Children who played online games when they were younger had lower test scores after one year of playing, while children who did not play online games when they were younger did not have this negative impact, according to the study (Chen & Fu, 2009). According to Hoffereth (2010), while examining data from children ages 6–12, a variety of characteristics, including gender, race/ethnicity, and school attendance, all had an impact on the association between computer usage and academic performance.
Higher computer usage was associated with better reading and math outcomes for Black men, as well as better reading and math outcomes for White females, according to the researchers. However, increased computer usage had no effect on the scores of either White males or Black females. According to the data, more video game participation was related with worse reading and math success in both white and black females, but not with substantially lower accomplishment in either black or white males. Small numbers of research have linked various forms of technology and interactive social media to adolescents’ academic achievement, and these studies have utilised current national statistics to draw the connection.
There are many factors to examine when examining the relationship between various forms of technology and interactive social media and academic accomplishment. These include age, gender, race/ethnicity, and other factors.
Method
The findings of a small study conducted on 4-year-old children from low-income families revealed that children who played age-appropriate educational games on a touch-screen surface made greater gains in literacy and mathematics skills than the control group, which only had access to age-appropriate entertainment software (Griffith et al., 2017[93]). The evidence to support the argument that playing video games has a detrimental impact on educational outcomes is, in general, devoid of compelling evidence to support the claim.
In accordance with the conclusions of the PISA 2009 study, the influence on performance may be “too modest to be regarded as negative” (Drummond and Sauer, 2014[94]). According to the findings of this study, there was little variation across nations. According to the findings of this field’s study, the use of video games by children and adolescents may have a range of harmful effects on their development. When doing research such as the ones outlined above, it is critical to emphasise that the outcomes may be very variable.
Due to characteristics like as cross-sectional design, dependence on self-report (or parental-report) to assess time spent gaming, limited sample numbers, and study design, there are considerable limitations in this discipline. More randomised controlled studies, bigger sample sizes, and outcomes that are more consistently replicable would all be advantageous in this subject, according to experts.
On top of all of that, publication bias has a detrimental influence on the overall outcomes of research in this field. Research suggests that playing video games may have both good and detrimental impacts on children in general, with the distinction between moderate and severe use of video games accounting for some of the discrepancy.
Overall, engaging with child-tailored educational material may have some benefits in terms of improved language skills, cognitive development, and brain maturity in children as a consequence of their exposure to this kind of content, according to the authors of the study. Although it is possible to mitigate this disadvantage by using onscreen characters who are socially relevant or recognisable, the research found that children learn better from live sources than they do from films.
In addition, children who originate from low-income homes or who have working parents who have less time to spend with their children may suffer as a result of this. The inclusion of television watching into a routine that includes a range of other health and development-promoting activities is possible even for infants and young children under the age of two. It is likely that limiting television viewing among children and adolescents who do not exhibit dangerous tendencies will not be necessary.. Furthermore, there is a possibility that the study literature on this subject will be contradictory, making it impossible to make definitive conclusions regarding the links between cognitive outcomes and screen use patterns.
By eliminating the economic and technical hurdles that prohibit people from utilising computers and the Internet from their homes, this research evaluated how a broad sample of families might utilise technology if they were given the option to do so for the first time. To begin, in 1995, the study gave home computers and Internet connections to 93 households in the Pittsburgh region as part of its research.
Within two years, information on these families was gathered by in-home interviews with research participants, periodic questionnaires, and automatically whenever members of these families used the internet during that time period. The study’s goal was to provide a thorough picture of the factors that promote or discourage Internet use, as well as the manner in which it was used and the effects of such use over time, over a long period of time.
For the purposes of this study, the sample included 208 adults as well as 110 children and adolescents (ranging in age from 10 to 19 years), who would be referred to collectively as teenagers in the following sections. In this part, we provide information on the Internet use of teenagers.
In order to better understand the impact of computer usage, we have concentrated our efforts primarily on two popular computer activities: gaming and the use of the Internet. In order to distinguish computer games from games played on other platforms (e.g., stand-alone game sets such as those from Nintendo and Sega, or hand-held games such as those from the Gameboy), we refer to them collectively as “computer games,” which includes all types of interactive games, regardless of what platform they are played on. In a similar vein, the distinction between games and the Internet is becoming more blurred, since interactive games are now available for play on the internet
.Constraints
The following are the four fundamental constraints that should be taken into account while conducting a research study and analysing the results of that investigation: The direction of influence could not be determined in this research since the data was collected using cross-sectional data, which was the case in this study, and hence could not be determined. It seems that the researchers were unable to identify why certain kinds of technology and social media were connected with superior academic accomplishment among teens in the first place, or why this connection was sustained over time, in their findings(Laur2019).
Proposed analysis
This information may also provide insight into the degree to which adversely correlated behaviours are caused by temporal dislocation or exposure to unproductive and nonacademic-related material on interactive social media sites such as Facebook, among other things. In addition, there are no measures of multitasking in this research, which is a basic flaw in the design of the study.
It is likely that the usage and exposure of technology, as well as the use of participatory social media platforms, have been exaggerated in recent years, particularly in the United States. Teenagers utilise a wide range of technologies throughout the course of a typical week, despite the fact that this research evaluates the relative relevance and usefulness, as well as the relative usefulness, of various kinds of technology and social media platforms, among other things.
Summary
Hopefully, future research will reveal that various forms of media intake are connected with different types of academic results in a variety of different ways. It should be mentioned that this study is based on the statements made by the children themselves, which may have an impact on the conclusions reached by the researchers in their research results. Consequently, determining the amount to which youth utilise technology and interactive social media platforms has proven challenging as a result of this problem.
References
Jensen, M., George, M.J., Russell, M.R. and Odgers, C.L., 2019. Young adolescents’ digital technology use and mental health symptoms: Little evidence of longitudinal or daily linkages. Clinical Psychological Science, 7(6), pp.1416-1433.
Laurie, M.H., Warreyn, P., Uriarte, B.V., Boonen, C. and Fletcher-Watson, S., 2019. An international survey of parental attitudes to technology use by their autistic children at home. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 49(4), pp.1517-1530.
Toh, S.H., Howie, E.K., Coenen, P. and Straker, L.M., 2019. “From the moment I wake up I will use it… every day, very hour”: a qualitative study on the patterns of adolescents’ mobile touch screen device use from adolescent and parent perspectives. BMC pediatrics, 19(1), pp.1-16.
van Roekel, E., Keijsers, L. and Chung, J.M., 2019. A review of current ambulatory assessment studies in adolescent samples and practical recommendations. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 29(3), pp.560-577.
Know more about UniqueSubmission’s other writing services: