Association between television, movie, and video game exposure and school performance
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The relationship between media exposure and school performance has not been studied extensively in adolescents. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this work was to test the relative effects of television, movie, and video game screen time and content on adolescent school performance. METHODS: We conducted a population-based cross-sectional survey of middle school students (grades 5-8) in the Northeastern United States. We looked at weekday television and video game screen time, weekend television and video game screen time, cable movie channel availability, parental R-rated movie restriction, and television content restriction. The main outcome was self-report of school performance (excellent, good, average, or below average). We used ordinal logistic-regression analysis to test the independent effects of each variable, adjusting for demographics, child personality, and parenting style. RESULTS: There were 4508 students who participated in the study; gender was equally represented, and 95% were white. In multivariate analyses, after adjusting for other covariates, the odds of poorer school performance increased with increasing weekday television screen time and cable movie channel availability and decreased with parental restriction of television content restriction. As compared with children whose parents never allowed them to watch R-rated movies, children who watched R-rated movies once in a while, sometimes, or all of the time had significantly increased cumulative odds of poorer school performance. Weekend screen time and video game use were not associated with school performance. CONCLUSIONS: We found that both content exposure and screen time had independent detrimental associations with school performance. These findings support parental enforcement of American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines for media time (particularly weekdays) and content limits to enhance school success.
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Students with higher weekday screentime reported less academic excellence.
“This negative correlation is substantiated by survey of 4,508 North American adolescents by Sharif et al., 2006, which found that students with higher weekday screentime reported less academic excellence.”
From Extracurricular Video Game Use and Academic Achievement: A Systematic Literature Review (2026) · cites this paper as Sharif et al., 2006
Screen use for more than 2 h per day may be negatively associated with academic performance.
“The use of screens for a daily duration of more than 2 h may be negatively associated with academic performance [17,18,19].”
From Lifestyle Habits Predict Academic Performance in High School Students: The Adolescent Student Academic Performance Longitudinal Study (ASAP) (2019) · cites this paper as [18]
No studies have examined academic performance across multiple domains using national tests of achievement.
“Brief teacher or even student self-report global measures of academic performance have been frequently examined in previous research [31, 39], but no studies have examined academic performance across multiple domains using national tests of achievement.”
From Electronic media use and academic performance in late childhood: A longitudinal study (2020) · cites this paper as [39]
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- Authors
- Sharif, I., & Sargent, J. D.
- Affiliations
- Albert Einstein College of Medicine (US)
- Dartmouth–Hitchcock Medical Center (US)
- Corresponding author
- Sharif, Iman
- Venue
- Pediatrics
- Publisher
- American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)
- Published
- 2006-10-01
- Volume
- 118
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- e1061-e1070
- ISSN
- 0031-4005 (ISSN-L)
- 1098-4275
- OpenAlex
- W2152189347
- Cited by
- 252
- References
- 35
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 15 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 13 · 2019: 12 · 2018: 14 · 2017: 17 · 2016: 15 · 2015: 20 · 2014: 20 · 2013: 21 · 2012: 14
- FWCI
- 27.90
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- PEDIATRICS (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- UCLA - Biblioteca de Ciencias de la Salud (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Education › Child Development and Digital Technology
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Impact of Technology on Adolescents
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Media Influence and Health
- Keywords
- video game use, academic performance, adolescents, junior high school students
- MeSH terms
- Achievement, Activities of Daily Living, Adolescent, Child, Cross-Sectional Studies, Data Collection, Educational Status, Female, Humans, Male, Motion Pictures, New England, Personality, Television, Parenting, Guidelines as Topic, Video Games
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