Overall, the (%tst), which is the percentage of total sleep time, remained the same throughout the experiment and for each participant. There was a decrease in sleep efficiency recorded for the night when the participants watched a movie on television a few hours before bed. The time it took for the participants to fall asleep, the sleep-onset latency, increased significantly on the nights in which the participants played an hour of an interactive computer games a few hours before bed. It went from an average of 10 to 18 minutes to fall asleep to 32 to 57 minutes to fall asleep. This night also showed an increase in the amount of time the children were in stages 2 and 4 of the sleep cycle, showing that it took them a longer time to fall into a deeper sleep. The night with interactive computer gaming also showed a significantly more negative affect on the verbal memory of the children the next day than watching television produced.
The experiment required that the participants continue their day as normal, but to not watch any television or play any interactive computer or video games. About 4-5 hours before the average bed time of the participants, between 8:30 and 9:30pm, they were given a visual memory test and a verbal memory test and their performance was recorded. Then, 2-3 hours before the average bed time, participants either played an hour of an interactive computer game or watched a movie on the television. Their sleep was then recorded from the time they went the bed to the time they woke up the next morning. The same type of visual and verbal memory tests were performed 24 hours after the first tests were administered. The participants were also instructed to keep a sleep diary throughout the day. This was used to record if, and when, they felt tired during the day. This addition of qualitative data to the quantitative sleep data strengthens their results and allows for an opportunity to explain anything that may be out of the ordinary with the children's diary responses.
According to the researchers, there are not many other studies that attempt to view the relationship between interactive computer gaming and sleep patterns. Just one that they acknowledged, by Higuchi et al, produced similar results in which it took longer for children to fall asleep, sleep-onset latency, after interacting with computer games. Another well-known series of studies, performed between 1928 and 1933 were the Payne Fund studies. They tested the effects of movie viewing on children on not only sleep patterns but also children's attitudes about violence, their delinquent behavior and their knowledge of foreign countries and their cultures.
As a college student, because this study was performed on children, you may be wondering why it has any relation to you at all. The study conducted by Dworak, Schierl, Bruns, and Struder (2007) shows evidence that the issues the children may be having now with their sleep patterns can increase as they age into adolescents. We are always interacting with television, video games, computer games, and most of this is happening on our laptop computers. This interaction with the media so often could also be affecting our sleep patterns. The children's sleep patterns were affected and it decreased their ability to memorize and recall facts that were verbally presented to them. If students are having the same issues with their sleep patterns, due to increased media usage, they may not be able to memorize or recall what is presented to them in verbal lecture based classes. This could then lead to decreased performance on class assignments and exams and maybe even decreased final grades in classes. If researchers were to complete a similar study using college aged students and found similar results, they may encourage college students to decrease their media viewing in order to attain better memory for verbal presentations.
Overall, this study has allowed me to assess the amount of media I may view on a daily basis and has encouraged me to decrease this amount in an attempt to improve my memory. As a result, I hope that this will improve my performance in class and, in turn, increase my grades in the future. I encourage others to do the same as I have.
To start off, the headline of the post was great. It was precise and explanatory without giving away too much. It answered questions such as “who” and “what” as well as provided an insight as to what the study discussed within the post would generally be about. As I read further into the post, I was really looking at how the content was organized as opposed to what it actually was. I found that the first few paragraphs included a lot of information that could have been separated more strategically. The introduction should have been slightly longer, or maybe a little more to the point. There were a lot of ideas and concepts about this study that were not defined. A large amount of the body paragraphs were dedicated to the results of the study as opposed to the relevance of it. The results of the study could have been described without having to give exact data, because as a college student I am more interested in why this is important to me. In addition to this, the data that was explained was easy to read in the first image provided, if the image had been slightly larger. It was difficult to see what the graph demonstrated due to it’s size. Regardless, the overall structure of the post was great. It started off explaining what the study was, explaining the results and what they meant, why it is important to worry about the children who are subject to this study and why college students should care. However, I feel that the weight of the post should have been distributed differently. By this I mean that too much of the post was used up to explain the results of the study and not enough on why college students should concern themselves with the study. A link was provided to the study at the very beginning of the post however, a second study was brought up to compare and support the findings of the first study. I would have liked to see a link for this study as well because it was only described briefly and the significance of the comparison between the two studies was not provided. The post did efficiently connect the experiment and findings of the study to terms and concepts provided in chapter 12 of the textbook. These terms and concepts include qualitative/quantitative research and new directions in media research. This is because the post efficiently compared the study to one that focused on television as opposed to video games. At the very end, when the relevance of this post to college students was provided the points brought up were very strong. However, they were not elaborated which is something that an audience would be interested in. If the post linked another study that focuses primarily on college students, the audience would be targeted correctly and therefore would have taken more away from the post. An article I would have included to support the final statements made in the post would have been this one:
ReplyDeletehttp://mountaineernewsservice.com/bad-grades-and-sleep-problems-linked-to-excessive-use-of-social-media/
Overall, the post was well thought out and structured but left room for improvement.
I really enjoyed reading this article because not only did it state what they felt, but it also states research that is done to prove it. I agree that interactive computer gaming affects children’s sleep cycles because of the addiction that comes with participating in fun interactive games. Every child wants to play games and have fun, but they don’t realize that they become addicted. I feel that the headline is very good because it states a “who, what, where, when, and why.” It is very important to have a headline that answers all five of these questions in order for it to be an explanatory headline. The picture placement was also very good because it came after the text, and it was also a very good explanatory photo. A good explanatory photo is one that someone can understand what is going on just by looking at it. I feel that all of the pictures included in this article were very good explanatory photos and went right with the article. Even though the research done was very good, I feel that there should have been more of a relation as to why this happened rather than just understand how many people it happens to. I would include this article as another source (https://www.sleepio.com/blog/2012/12/02/video-games-and-sleep-loss/) because it says how and why a sleep cycle would be messed up do to interactive games. It gives facts that makes one understand a cause an effect relationship very clearly, which is what I felt this article needed. Overall, I felt this was a very good article but the incorporation of “why” this happens should be included.
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