Playing games lowers your grades?
It's not that simple
Happy Thanksgiving to all of my readers celebrating in the US! I hope you have a safe and happy holiday season!
Hello JOMT Reader!
Video games were (and in some cases still are) considered a childish waste of time. It was a past time reserved for the most reclusive introverts who didn’t have a social life outside of their game worlds. I was one of those introverts — not reclusive, but certainly not the social butterfly that some of my peers were.
Fast forward several decades to the years the world spent in isolation during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This point in world history temporarily softened the hard stance that many people held towards gaming. Video games provided the connections that we craved and for many, it was the safest way to remain connected to loved ones.
As we crested over the peak of the pandemic and onto the other side, the once-softened stance is hardening again. There are numerous scholarly articles stating that “the COVID-19 pandemic has [worsened the occurrence of] internet gaming disorder due to increased gaming time from isolation and anxiety.”1
But the research is becoming a lot more nuanced than “video games are good/bad.” Researchers are starting to see the way video games affect us, both good and bad, and are beginning to understand how we might address the bad effects and enhance the good ones.
One of the most documented effects of video games is on academic performance. There is no real consensus about the effect, as it seems that for every scholarly article about the positive effects of gaming on school grades, three others about their negative effects are published.23 That balance, tipped towards the negative, tracks with my own experience. “There’s no reset button for your grades” was a common household phrase during my childhood, meant to warn me of the dangers of getting too deep into gaming.
In order to add a bit more colour to the discussion about how video games affect school grades, a research group based in Malaysia asked this key question:
What individual factors (like expectations for highest level of education or learning attitude) and family-based factors (like parent-child relationships) influence learning, ultimately tied to school grades?
Video game playing is weakly correlated to other variables
In these types of studies, researchers first look to establish relationships between all the variables they are looking to study. These relationships are assigned a number between -1 and 1 (called a correlation coefficient), which tells the researcher the strength of the relationship between variables. A correlation coefficient of 0 means that the two variables aren’t related to each other at all; a correlation coefficient of 1 means that there is a perfectly positive correlation between the two variables (when one variable increases, so does the other); a correlation coefficient of -1 means that there is a perfectly negative correlation (when one variable increases, the other decreases).
Looking at the data, the correlation coefficients for video game playing are weak at best: they all range between -0.11 and -0.20. In English, that means that those who played video games more often had very slightly lower expectations about the level of education they expected to achieve, motivation to learn, closeness with parents, and school grades.
The authors do report statistical significance for these results, meaning that it is unlikely that chance alone was responsible for these numbers. But with correlation coefficients so close to 0, it’s hard for me to conclude that there is a meaningful effect. Still, the authors conclude that playing video games is associated with lower school grades.
Parents can get in the way of school grades
The researchers also looked at different combinations of variables to see if mixing and matching them would reveal something about the relationship of these variables. One of the most interesting findings is how the parent-child relationship affects school grades for those who do and don’t play video games.
School grades were pretty similar for students who don’t really play video games, regardless of their relationship with their parents. This, to me at least, is somewhat surprising because I was under the impression that parental involvement strengthened a child’s learning.
What’s even more surprising is that the test scores changed dramatically for the worse in those who play a lot of games and who have a good relationship with their parents.
Why was this so? Even the researchers note that this result is different compared with other similar studies. One explanation might be that a high parent-child relationship means a more relaxed stance on video game playing, leading to more instances of excessive game playing. On the other hand, a low parent-child relationship is often associated with lack of freedom for the child, meaning more strict rules around keeping school grades high even if they play video games.
The (more) complete model
There are a few more relationships that the researchers tested that I didn’t write about but all the complicated maths can be summarized by the following model:
Ignoring the numbers for a second, this model says that the negative effect of playing video game on school grades can be softened by high expectations about the level of education students want to achieve and better learning attitudes. A better parent-child relationship enhances the softening effect of the student’s self-expectations. At the same time though, a better parent-child relationship adds to the negative effect that playing video games has on school grades.
If we turn our attention to the numbers now, all of them are fairly small, except for two that are in the 0.2 range. It’s the first major limitation of this study: while the effect may be statistically significant, it’s very small. So small that it might not be noticeable or practical in a real-world setting.
If you are interested in a more in-depth look at why putting too much emphasis on statistically significant results can backfire, I encourage you to read
and his post on thinking in distributions:
What these small numbers tell me is that there is much more going on behind the scenes than the four variables listed here that ultimately affect school grades. For one, there weren’t any question related to the general health (including mental health) of the students or parents. Another is the quality of teaching that students receive. I’m sure there are other factors that affect school grades that weren’t included here.
Other limitations
Much of the data analyzed in this study was gathered from questionnaires which limited the level of detailed information. For example, video game playing was classified on a scale from 1 to 4, with 1 being seldom playing video games and 4 being always playing video games. But is “seldom playing video games” the same for everyone? Is that once a day for an hour? Or once a week for five hours?
In the same way, attitudes toward learning was scored based on three questions about if they would consider going to school even if they were sick, if they would finish homework that they disliked, and if they would finish homework even if it takes them a long time. For me, these questions are less about learning attitudes and more about cultural or societal expectations.
What about the parents’ attitudes toward gaming? A household with positive attitudes towards video games might even be using games as a part of their learning. Or was there a larger population of children who played a lot of video games in households where the parents were not in favour of gaming?
Where do we go from here?
Based on the results of this study, my conclusion is that there is inconclusive evidence that playing video games has a negative effect on school grades. It’s too small to make an authoritative statement. But the researchers did take a step forward in the right direction by identifying a bunch of other factors that could affect the relationship between video game playing and school grades. Researchers in the future will need to identify even more factors for a more complete look at how the two things are related.
Beyond that, I think it is a good reminder that news headlines rarely tell the whole tale4; before I looked closely at the data, I wouldn’t have guessed that the effect sizes would be so small. One thing is for certain: there is undoubtedly some relationship between playing video games and school grades. We’re only starting to get a glimpse into what that relationship might be.
If you want to read more about this study, you can access the article here for free: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0313405#pone.0313405
If you liked what you read, please consider giving this post a like and sharing it with your community! Do any of you in the community feel like video games impacted your school grades? Feel free to share below!
Source https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39294602/
I reworded the text in square brackets because the original was leaning too technical.
A list of articles highlighting the positive effects of video games on school grades:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cad.20030
https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fa0034857
A longer list of articles highlighting the negative effects of video games on school grades:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/intr-01-2013-0004/full/html
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78916-9
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1745691615592239
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2751330
https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fppm0000204
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01443410.2014.972342
Did I get you with my own headline? ;)
Why can't it be simple?! I get what they're trying to prove and do, and I may be biased, but I truly just believe that parents need to pay attention to their children and set expectations. Everything will affect grades, and as you said, mental health is a huge one. My wife's a social worker and she has told me that a lot of the times a child is getting bad grades, something's happening in the household. Again, videogames can be addicting and can affect a child, but the kids are buying the games themselves. Yap done.
This is interesting. But I think the attempt to distil it into quantifiable research is letting gaming off the hook.
The research points to the x factor: motivated students with a good support structure will do better, regardless if they play games or not. By that logic, unmotivated students will do less well, especially when they have a fun distraction, such as video games.
Anecdotally, I can confirm that. I spent way too much time playing Mortal Kombat at the local arcade or Sierra Online games on my PC instead of studying, and I did it because I was more motivated to play games than to study.
Games are fantastic for distraction. It used to be TV, then games. I bet there's a similar correlation with online media today (though I think games are a special case since they make you feel like you're accomplishing something).