POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES

MEM COLLEGE OF EDUCATION

TERM PAPER in
FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATION:
Negative Impact of TV Viewing on
the Educational Development of a
Child.

Submitted to:
Professor Zenaida A. Olonan

Submitted by:
Rose Ann H. Zimara
Topic :
Negative Impact of TV Viewing on the Educational Development of a Child.
In school cheating is being rampant the same with technology. Everything we do is bounded by technology
and we can't do anything without the presence of it. One of the most popular technologies nowadays is the television.

Every family household, there is a television set which has currently become the part of most childrens everyday
lives. As according to research (McDonough, 2009), children ages 2-5 spend 32 hours a week in front of a TV while
kids ages 6-11 spend about 28 hours a week in front of the TV. Children are fond of watching television because of
the colorful pictures and lively sounds that entertain them. But remember, every good thing has a dark side, thus, the
TV's disadvantages outweigh any benefits it can provide. This is because it will have a great impact on childrens
educational development.
Watching TV affects the childrens educational development by; first, it can lead to poor language skills. A
child who spends time watching TV loses the time needed for conversation, and may well find difficulty becoming
articulate and fluent, and be less able to speak and write in complete sentences than the child who, it seems "just
never stops talking". It is evident in the demonstration done by Marian Cleeves Diamond, a professor of
neuroanatomy at the University of California at Berkeley where she studied the brain size of caged rats that were
given toys to play with, and compared them with those of rats that were without these stimuli. She discovered that
the rats in the "enriched" environment had heavier and larger brains when autopsied and showed the increase nerve
branching that allows the cells to communicate better with each other. An "enriched" environment is where a child's
language skills and creativity are challenged by playing with toys, reading or talking. If a child can use and apply the
language in a conversation, s/he can accumulate a wide variety of experiences and exposure to the language. Also,
the acquisition of language may happen. Although children may hear new words on a TV show, this is not the same
as speaking. A child rarely develops proficiency with speech simply by watching TV or by getting older.
Furthermore, study found that the background noise from televisions stop children from learning to talk as early as
they should as it disturbs the brain from processing the information they heard.
Second, TV can discourage and replace reading. Dr Jerre Levy said Brain is just like muscles: If you don't
exercise them they wither. If you don't exercise brains, they wither. When a young child doesn't have the thinking
done for him and the images displayed in front of him, his brain must go to work to create a picture using his
imagination. A child becomes passive and it is hard for him/ her to picture out the written text as it leaves little scope
for the imagination. With TV, a child doesn't imagine much because the images are already there for him or her on
the screen. When the time comes to draw upon creative thinking skills in school and other settings, the connections
in the brain required for the tasks aren't available. The child has no prior experience for imagining what a scene in
history the teacher is describing looks like or what an angry crowd in the scene might sound like.
Third, the correlation between the amounts of time a child spends watching TV and his / her academic
performance. Shins study established three hypotheses for the negative impact of television viewing on the
performance of the students. The first hypothesis is the displacement theory. According to this theory, the time spent
with television takes simply time away from more valuable activities, such as reading. Time displacement which
means that television watching diverts the students from the intellectual thinking, which is why the performance and
grades of students are affected. Consider how a high school student may distribute her activities between studying
and watching T.V. If no restrictions are placed on the students behavior, she will probably spend a lot more time
watching TV than studying.
Another hypothesis named as the mental-effect hypothesis in which watching television can lead to the
laziness of the mind. Shin proved that watching television do not requires more mental attention as compared to
other form of communication i.e., reading and writing, which mean that less mental capabilities are utilized during
television viewing than any other activity. Having talking heads continuously giving us quick information, opinion,
analysis and criticism for just about everything, allows us to stop using our critical thinking. In this way, we can be
easily misinformed and manipulated. Teachers have reported strong resistance among children, not only to reading,
but to exerting any kind of effort. It is human nature to be lazy; if there is an easier way of doing something then

humans will find it. Furthermore, habitual TV viewing can affect the physical self as it can alter brain waves, reduce
critical eye movements, immobilize the hands and body, and undermine nutrition and eating habits.
The third hypothesis is arousal hypothesis which concludes that television viewing can deteriorate the
academic performance as it encourages spontaneous behaviors and discourage sustained activities. When the TV is
uncontrolled in a household, on from morning till night and the child comes home from school, changes clothes and
provides himself with a snack, the next activity is to sit down in front of his television set for hours. And if no one is
home, he can be there until it is time to bed or he falls asleep.
Fourth, television may promote development of brain systems that scan and shift attention at the expense of
those that focus attention. Such decreased attention span is due to the pacing of the TV program or movie, which
determines that a child will watch one image for 3 seconds, another for 7 seconds, another for 5 seconds, and so on.
Since the images change rapidly, so does the shift of the child's attention. The determined length of a TV program
before a commercial interruption can also condition a child to a "commercial break" attention span which the
children's inner clocks anticipate a commercial break. It may affect the child's concentration in school and can
interfere with the completion of homework assignments. Besides, the frenetic pace of television, with its rapidly
changing sound and images, may overwhelm the nervous system of some young children and lead to Attention
Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) previously known as Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).
Lastly, Television viewing contributes in the students aggressiveness in the class. Television can expose
children to a heavy diet of raw violence and mindless commercials-hardly subjects that develop the intellectual
power of children. American Psychological Association reported that before children complete elementary school,
they will have watched 8,000 murders and 100,000 additional incidents of television violence. By the time these
children are 18 years old, the figures jump to 40,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence. TV violence makes
children more willing to harm others because they learn to accept violence as an ordinary situation and action.
The use of television among young children as well as school age children has been critically discussed by
many previous and recent researches. This is because there are more negative outcomes that can be seen among these
children due to excessive amount of television viewing and also with the broad range of content being broadcasted,
which include violent, sexual, alcohol and so forth. Thus, it is now important for parents to make sure that their
children are media literate so that they could later be a better consumer, being pro-social, and develop other positive
development. However, as young children today are the people of tomorrow, it is important for them to be media
literate once they are exposed to the television.

Resources
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