Why boys' literacy skills lag behind girls' and how to bridge the reading gap

[Mosby]

10. not a good comparison

Playing with dolls is a social activity, when girls play with dolls they create dialoge and story lines, including extensive back stories. Its a way to model and mimic adult behavior through play.

Video games by contrast are a passive activity that has virtually no social component and doesn't require the gamer to use his/her brain in any meaningful way.

Below I linked to an experiment that clearly shows the damage that video games cause in young children. They discovered that time spent playing these stupid games displaced other, more constructive activities like reading.

Of course, the fact that video games are irrationally vilified doesn’t mean that they are automatically harmless. There’s still a need for decent studies that assess their impact on behaviour. One such study has emerged from Denison University, where Robert Weis and Brittany Cerankosky have tested what happens when you give young boys, aged 6-9, a new video game system. 

They found that after 4 months, boys who had received the games had lower reading and writing scores than expected, failing to improve to the same degree as their console-less peers. They also faced more academic problems at school. At first this might seem like support for the rewired brains of Greenfield’s editorials, but the reality is much simpler – the games were displacing other after-school academic activities. While some children were finishing their homework or reading bedtime stories, those with games were mashing buttons.

There is much to like about Weis and Cerankosky’s study. For a start, it is a randomised controlled trial (RCT), one of the most reliable ways of finding out if something is truly causing a specific effect. Indeed, it is the first such trial looking into the effects of video games on the academic abilities and behaviour of young boys.


The duo recruited 64 lads who didn’t already have a video game system. Half of them – the experimental group – were randomly chosen to receive a Playstation 2 via their parents along with three all-ages games. The other half – the control group – remained without a console.  The parents were told that the study was designed to examine the boys’ development and that the video games were merely incentive for participation.

Four months later, Weis and Cerankosky caught up with the boys. They found that the budding gamers had significantly lower reading and writing scores than those who never received the PS2. In the intervening months, the control group became better at reading and writing, while the gamers stagnated or, if anything, became slightly worse. This didn’t escape the notice of their teachers, who said that they were showing more problems at school in reading, writing and spelling.

http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2010/02/23/trial-finds-that-video-games-hamper-reading-and-writing-skil/