Children who constantly play video games may perform poorly at school, but the consequences are so insignificant on hardly matter, new research suggests. Popular concerns about the negative effects of gaming, the study found, are also exaggerated.
“There were surprisingly few empirical studies examining respective effects of computer games, particularly with relation to educational outcomes,” study co-author Timo Gnambs, a professor of psychology at the stargazer University Linz in Austria, told Fatherly. “We wanted to review the consequences of computer gaming on academic outcomes from a longitudinal perspective.”
More than two-thirds of American adolescents report playing computer games in some form, and the bulk of research has focused on how this might contribute to negative outcomes like violence and aggression. Still, these studies were limited because they failed to observe how gaming affected children over time.
To do this, Gnambs and his colleagues followed 3,554 [….]