Children Using Technology Have Better Literacy Skills 146
Posted
by
timothy
from the exactly-as-useful-as-other-self-assessments dept.
from the exactly-as-useful-as-other-self-assessments dept.
eldavojohn writes "A UK study of three thousand children aged nine to sixteen suggests something that may not come as a shock to geeks: using technology increases a child's core literary skills. As Researcher Obvious put it, 'The more forms of communications children use the stronger their core literary skills.' And for those of us worried about a world of 'tl;dr' and 'Y U H8n?' the research claims that 'text speech' does not damage literacy. The biggest shortcoming of this research is that it appears the children graded their own writing in that their methodology was an online survey designed to ask the children which technology they use and then follow up with asking them how well they write to determine which children have better literacy skills."
Re:you know... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Huge Fail (Score:3, Informative)
Beats me. Especially in light of the fact that people who are bad at something completely overestimate their skill-level. This data is complete junk. Nevertheless, I fully expect it to be repeated ad nauseam all over the place.
Re:Huge Fail (Score:5, Informative)
Well, and don't *you* know... (Score:2, Informative)
There are statistical techniques to analyze the contribution of multiple variables to a result, and social scientists routinely use these techniques to control for confounding factors like wealth.
For example, a typical study on something racism will claim something like, say, that after controlling for wealth and education, black people get worse deals on mortages; that is, the study will use statistical techniques to isolate the contribution of the three variables (race, wealth and education). A typical dumbass that doesn't like the conclusion of the study, however, will claim that the study is invalid because blacks are poorer and less educated than whites, and poorer people get worse mortgage deals. Which is, of course, a strawman, because the statistical techniques used in these studies are normally designed to compare people who have similar wealth and education but different race.
I certainly can't vouch for the study that's mentioned in this article, but I somehow doubt that you're any more ready to vouch against it.
Re:Huge Fail (Score:5, Informative)
Happens all the time, it's called peer review.
Your lack of science knowledge is astounding.
Peer review is you know, when your peers review your work. That's why it's called peer review, and not self review.