The Daily Orange

Media Credit: David Saracino [Click to enlarge]

Take a look in a student's dorm room. It's not hard to believe that textbooks and notebooks might take a backseat to Madden 2008, released in August, and Halo 3, released today.

"Students should be aware of the distractions that affect their grade performance," said Todd Stinebrickner, associate professor of economics and director of graduate studies at the University of Western Ontario.

Stinebrickner and his father, Ralph Stinebrickner, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Berea College in Kentucky, recently conducted a study that was part of a larger survey project about how college students use their time and the implications of that time use.

"We were really interested in the college dropout decision," Stinebrickner said. "Time use is a very big part of that decision."

A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that first-year students whose roommate brought a video game console to college studied, on average, 40 minutes less each day. Data showed that this significant decrease in study time caused first-semester grades to drop by .241 points on the 4.0 grade scale.

"The amount of time a student spends studying and the effort they put into it can weigh heavily on their overall performance in school," Stinebrickner said.

While at first glance, the study may seem to be stating the obvious, Stinebrickner said the conclusive evidence he and his father found linking studying time and grade performance is largely uncharted territory.

"Simply comparing the grades of students who study more to those students who study less and claiming that a causal link exists is not legitimate," Stinebrickner said. "People who tend to study more could be those who have more ability academically or those who are in more demanding classes. A lot of unwanted variables are introduced. Standard comparisons are problematic."

To narrow down the comparison, Stinebrickner and his father incorporated an instrumental variable. In this case, it was the presence of a video game console in dorm rooms.

"A video game player gives something that looks like the ideal test experiment. It is a known fact that video games naturally make students study less," Stinebrickner said. "Nothing is forced or could be considered artificial."

Continued...

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