Video-gaming is a common pastime among adolescents, particularly adolescent males in industrialized nations. Despite widespread suggestions that video-gaming negatively affects academic achievement, the evidence is inconclusive. We reanalyzed data from over 192,000 students in 22 countries involved in the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to estimate the true effect size of frequency of videogame use on adolescent academic achievement in science, mathematics and reading. Contrary to claims that increased video-gaming can impair academic performance, differences in academic performance were negligible across the relative frequencies of videogame use. Videogame use had little impact on adolescent academic achievement.
History
Publication title
PL o S One
Volume
9
Issue
4
Article number
e87943
Number
e87943
Pagination
1-5
ISSN
1932-6203
Department/School
School of Psychological Sciences
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Place of publication
United States
Rights statement
Copyright 2014 The Authors-This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.(CC BY 3.0 AU).