As both a parent and an educator I struggle with when one should raise alarms. If one raises too many alarms, either at home or in school, the danger is that they will be ignored. On the other hand, if one is aware of a situation that you believe will have significant ramifications, it is hard to stay quiet. One area about which I have raised alarms many times over the past 20 years is the amount of time young Americans spend in front of television and the data that study after study reveals regarding its impact on academic achievement. Students who watch excessive amounts of television - defined by most studies as more than three hours per day - do significantly worse in both reading and math than those who watch less.

To these previous concerns we now need to add the dangers of "multitasking." With the growth of many different forms of electronic media in addition to television, researchers started noting the amount of time each day students spent instant messaging, text messaging on their phones, calling by cell phones and e-mailing as well as watching TV - often simultaneously with studying. A year ago researchers began to start putting numbers on these behaviors.

In a study released in March 2005, on the basis of data from media diaries kept by students, the average student devoted six hours and 21 minutes a day to recreational media use. (The study noted that this is more than 44 hours per week - four more hours than a parent's typical workweek.) The unanswered question at that time, according to Vicky Rideout, vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, was "what effect this behavior has on the often fragile ability of kids to focus." Of the particular concern is the fact that one third of students, grades 3 to 12, indicated that they chatted on the phone, surfed the web, sent instant messages, watched TV or listened to music "most of the time" while doing their homework.

According to a new study that was just published in the July 24, 2006 edition of the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, brain research suggests that electronic distractions can affect the way people learn. ESchool News Online quotes one of those conducting the study, Russell A. Poldrack of UCLA, as saying "When a kid is trying to learn new concepts, new information, distraction is going to be bad ... it's going to impair (his or her) ability to learn." Furthermore, Poldrack said that what was learned in a different fashion "making the knowledge they gain harder to use later on." It is "less efficient" and "less useful."

It would seem that many of the admonitions of our parents and grandparents about study habits made a lot of sense. Students who want to do their best need to limit television time and need to concentrate on their work when they are studying.