Video games and class attendance

I've been reading a lot of the research literature lately, on the impact of class attendance on student performance. That relates to writing up some of my own research, based on an experiment I conducted on the ECONS101 class in 2019 (and would have done again in 2020 and this year, if the pandemic hadn't intervened). Anyway, I'll blog about that experiment a bit more in a future post. In this post, I want to talk about this 2018 article I had in my (far too large) to-be-read pile, by Michael Ward (University of Texas at Arlington), published in the journal Information Economics and Policy (ungated version here).

Ward used data from the American Time Use Survey from 2005 to 2012, and looked at the impact of video game playing on the amount of time devoted to class attendance and homework completion, among high school and college students. Ordinarily, this would be a difficult question to get a causal estimate of, as Ward explains:

...a potential negative association between video game play and time devoted to learning may be due to selection of individuals with different preferences for learning as well as a causal result of crowding out. It is possible that marginally performing students are less attached to school and invest less in human capital. Marginally performing students also may have a preference for video game playing. Even without a difference in preferences, they may allocate some of the time freed up from reduced participation in educational activities toward video game playing. In both cases, we would expect a negative correlation between gaming and educational inputs.

In other words, we might observe a negative correlation between video game playing and class attendance because the types of students who play video games are also the types of students who don't attend class anyway, or because students who don't attend class have more time and could therefore use more of that time to play video games (this would be a case of reverse causation).

Ward gets around this problem using instrumental variables analysis. As he explains:

I construct an instrumental variable from video game popularity. When the currently available games are perceived to be higher quality, the utility from playing video games rises. This is a temporary increase because the attractiveness of video games tends to fall quickly with cumulative time played. This temporary increase in marginal utility can result in large swings in the sales of video games from week to week. Thus, week-to-week variation in video game sales will be a valid instrumental variable if it affects time spent playing video games but has no direct effect on time spent on educational activities.

Video game sales can act as an instrument for time spent playing video games because it has no direct impact on time spent studying (in-class or on homework). Ward limits his analysis to weekdays, avoiding the summer holidays and the period between Thanksgiving and the end of the year, he has a sample of 3016 observations of daily time use. Looking at the impact of video game sales for each day (combined with the day before) on study time, he finds that:

A one standard deviation in video game sales leads to an average reduction in class time of about 16 minutes which corresponds to nearly a 10%% [sic] reduction. Video game time is consistently estimated to decrease homework time but this result is smaller and not always statistically significant. The marginal effect of gaming on homework by males is larger than for females but the effect on class attendance is not different from females.

So, video game playing does reduce class attendance, and the reduction is approximately one-for-one (for every additional hour spent playing games, class attendance reduces by an hour). Students aren't trying to make up for it by additional studying outside of class either, so that suggests there is likely a negative impact on student performance (to the extent that class attendance improves student performance). Unfortunately, as much as teachers may wish otherwise, this is the sort of exogenous impact on attendance that it would be difficult for any teacher to combat. Making classes more interactive and encouraging attendance constantly runs up against student preferences for leisure activities.

Finally, Ward's analysis combined all gaming (including console games, computer games, mobile games, and board games [!]). It would be interesting to see if mobile gaming (which is even more prevalent now than it was in the 2005 to 2012 period that Ward's data comes from) has different effects from other gaming. Since, by definition, mobile gaming can be performed anywhere, it might not affect class attendance by as much (although it might affect the extent to which students pay attention in class!). Unfortunately, the time use data doesn't disaggregate gaming further, so it will take a whole other study to answer that question.