Anticipated Date of Graduation

Spring 2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Mathematical Sciences

Department

Mathematical Sciences

First Advisor

Doug Darbro

Abstract

Playing video games is one of the most popular ways for modern adolescents to spend their free time. Clearly, anything that takes up potentially hundreds or thousands of hours of a young person’s life is going to affect various aspects of that person’s development. Some video games are more cerebrally engaging than others, requiring logical reasoning and problem-solving skills, and yet only in recent years have researchers attempted to differentiate between video games based on their content. Experiential Learning Theory implies that spending time on more cognitively stimulating video games should positively impact the cognitive abilities of the player, but the displacement hypothesis suggests that video games are more harmful because they take away from time that would otherwise be spent on more directly beneficial activities. This study gathered survey and state test data from students at two very different high schools on opposite ends of the United States in early 2024, but after issues with parental consent forms, one school had to be excluded from the study. The data from 81 students were analyzed with descriptive statistics, ANOVA, and hierarchical linear regression analysis in order to determine if the types of video games that students spend the most time on affected their performance on the mathematics portion of their state tests, after controlling for self-reported gender and the amount of time they spend playing video games on average. None of the predictors – gender, time spent gaming, nor most played type of video game – were significant in either the ANOVA or the hierarchical linear regression, and effect sizes were very small. These results coincide with most prior video-game related research insofar as they indicate that if there is any impact of gaming on academic performance, it is either minimal or highly nuanced. Future research may reveal that some relationship does exist between gaming and academic performance, but such studies will need larger sample sizes than that of this study and/or tightly controlled experiments.

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