Effect of Viewing Television on the Children Academic Performance - Essay Example

Introduction In any society children will be considered as a big asset in apart from showing uniqueness from each other. When a child is educated it is hoped that the education will contribute greatly to the child’s personality development with all the learning experiences that the children are presented to will contribute a great deal the desired achievements. The family unit is considered to be a crucial environment that contributes tremendously to the child development. The achievement realized by children in their lives is not only determined by the genetic inheritance but the environment also plays a big role. The schools in which the children get their formal education together with the children’s family background will have an influence on the quality and nature of educational experiences of the children and their general development as well. The family unit is considered as the ideal place for preparation and reinforcement of symbolic attribution which is very important for schooling and that the schooling process will use what has imparted on the children at a family level so as to develop the child farther. Each family has its own uniqueness as pertains their structure and how they function. In each school environment there is also some uniqueness and this is added to the uniqueness of the children. When the children are exposed to varying environments at their homes, having a thorough understanding of how their experience at the family unit will influence their academic achievement is of importance. With the advance in technology gadgets like television are available in almost all households. The pressures of life also have resulted in some parents having very little time for their children. with little supervision from parents and in some circumstances lack of knowledge on the effect of children being over exposed to television viewing, some of the children will spend most of their time on television and this is likely to affect their studies. This is because the children may not have enough time to undertake their studies. The data obtained from some research findings with regards to effect of viewing television on the children academic performance has been analyzed. Results Table 1 gives the descriptive statistics of the study variables. For convenience the variables in this table and other tables have been abbreviated. That variable abbreviated avprof represents the average proficiency in the states that were investigated; bothparents gives the percentage students with both parents living at home; threemore represents the percentage of students with three or more reading materials in their homes; tenpages represents the percentage who read at least ten pages a day; “sixhours” represents the percentage of students who spent six or more hours per day watching TV while “absent” gives the percentage of students who had been absent from school for at least 3 or more days in a month. The variables are all numerical with the values being given as percentages except for the “avpro” variable. From the table it can be observed that “avpro” mean value is given as 260.9 with the minimum and maximum of 218.0 and 281.0 respectively. Hthe variable with the highest percentage is “threemore” where the mean value is 80.4% with a minimum and a maximum of 64.0% and 90.0% respectively. The variable absent had a mean percentage of 23.9% with a maximum of 37.0% and a minimum of 14.0%. The variable “sixhours” is seen to have the least mean of 14.0% where the minimum is 6.0% and the maximum is 33.0%. In terms of standard deviation, the variable “avpro” has the largest standard deviation of 13.2% which is expected as the variable has larger values. The least standard deviation of 4.1 is for the variable absent, this is smaller than that of variable “sixhours” which has the smallest mean percentage but its standard deviation is 5.2. Table 1 Descriptive Statistics N Minimum Maximum Mean Std. Deviation avprof 40 218.0 281.0 260.9 13.2 bothparents 40 47.0 85.0 77.7 6.5 threemore 40 64.0 90.0 80.4 6.3 tenpages 40 23.0 48.0 36.9 5.3 sixhours 40 6.0 33.0 14.0 5.2 absent 40 14.0 37.0 23.9 4.1 Valid N (listwise) 40 Correlation test result for variables A correlation test was used to find out how the variables were relating to each other with the results being as shown in table 2. From the table it can be seen that the strongest correlation was a negative with a value of -0.87 which was between the variables “avprof” and “sixhours”. The other pair of variables with strong negative correlation were: “bothparent versus “sixhours”; “threemore versus “sixhours” and “tenpages” versus “sixhours” with Pearson correlations of -.83, -.59 and -.79 respectively. All of these negative correlations were a statistically significant with p Read More