Study Links Short-Form Video Consumption to Poor Academic Performance in Children

According to new study from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, children who watch a lot of short-form videos like TikTok show signs of poor academic performance as they have reduced attention spans. The study shows that digital media is negatively influencing young kids. As the study was based in China where academic performances are highly important, the trend of young kids getting addicted to short-form videos is really alarming. Influence of parental media use and attention of students also affect academic performances of children a lot.

For the study, researchers gathered 1,052 elementary students from Shenzhen through their academic records and questionnaires. The students were asked to provide information about their short-form video watching habits and their parents were asked to provide information about their own media usage habits as well as their perspective of screen time of their children. The academic performance of children was assessed through their exam scores and the researchers also designed a test to measure stability, breadth, shifting and allocation habits of attention in those children.

The results of the study proved that there is a negative relationship between children watching short-form videos for a long time and their academic performance. As children were using a lot of time watching short-form videos, there was a decrease in their attention span and they were finding it difficult to focus on tasks related to their academics. This shows that there's a relationship between screen time and cognitive function and it can highly affect our attention and ability to perform various tasks.

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The study also found that there is an influence of parental role, as parents who watch short-form videos for a long time showed a negative relationship between their children’s attention and screen time. Children tend to copy what their parents do, but reduced opportunities for parent-child interactions because of high screen time of parents or children can also impact children’s focus. Children with less attention span due to watching short-form videos also had parents with more screen time, while children who showed moderate attention span had parents with less screen time.

These findings show that there is an influence of the family environment on children’s social media habits and parents’ behavior can shape children's experience with digital media. More studies need to be done to find out more behavioral implications between attention and media usage. It should also be done among various other cultures and regions so we can find out if that's the case in other parts of the world too.

Image: DIW-Aigen

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World