Greg Mankiw's Blog: Is TV bad for kids?

Greg Mankiw's Blog: Is TV bad for kids?

Evidence say? I am gonna watching TV!
But what I am going to watch? No Carl Sagan, and no Star Wars...

…Both studies focused on children from
relatively poor families. The Perry study enrolled an intervention
group in a two-year part-day preschool education program
during ages three and four. The Abecedarian project enrolled children
in a five-year full-day day care program through age five. In
both cases, children were randomly assigned to intervention and
control conditions, and both sets of children were followed into
adolescence. In the Perry program, children in the intervention
group scored one- to two-thirds of a standard deviation higher on
achievement tests at age fourteen (the average age of students
in our Coleman sample), with an overall effect of about one-half
of a standard deviation. In the Abecedarian program, effect sizes
on achievement at age fifteen were on the order of one-third of
a standard deviation. Norming these effects for the differences
in treatment duration between the studies, the Perry program
had an impact on achievement of approximately 0.25 standard
deviations per year of intervention, and the Abecedarian program
had an impact of approximately 0.07 to 0.08 standard deviations
per year.28