Pilot Project
8 classes were involved in the project from 4 different schools
from the Deep Cove district of North Vancouver. There were
a total of 178 students in grades 2-6 including 91 male students
and 87 female students. The intervention started with an audit
of media use (questionaires and diaries), followed by five
one hour in- class weekly workshops
(media education) and was supplement
with parent newsletter and workshop.The evaluation
was based on a tune out week activity diary as well
as student, parent and teacher interviews and playground observations.
Lots of people, including Adbusters promote Turning Media
Off. But few people have done the creative work of figuring
out we can communicate this idea effectively to kids. One
of the achievements that the project team is most proud of
is that we seemed to have designed a media education intervention,
that made it cool for kids to tune out the screen.
That is like making it cool to not smoke. Remember we never
told the kids what to do. Yet 93% of the kids voluntarily
decided to see if they could go with reduced media. 64% of
the children chose to go cold turkey, 29% adopted a 'controlled
use' approach, and less than 7% 'opted out' the challenge.
Whereas Robinson
reported a 30% reduction in media use we report an 80% reduction
in the time spent using video games and TV/ VCR's in the test
week. I don't think Robinson reports a reduction figure, but
rather a comparison between means at treatment schools and
control schools.
But it is hard to compare the two studies. Robinson obviously
had a lot more money and both conducted and evaluated the
programme over a longer time than we did. They focused on
grade 4's but we tried working with students from grades 2/3
through grade 5/6. Robinson compared across schools, and we
compared before and after treatments within subjects using
the difference between the time spend in week day screen use
as measured before the programme with the time spend during
the tune-out challenge week.
But these are issues of research method. In both cases we
have interesting evidence that kids are willing to experiment
with cutting down on their media use. Previous studies had
not shown the media education could have such impacts. Moreover,
we found that displacement effects maybe significant in understanding
the sedentary lifestyle. When kids do cut back on the screen,
they gain discretionary time, and we find that when supported
by parents and peers, they will do with it that which the
like best -- more often than not active play. Robinson
in his overweight study
did not look at what kids did. We also put we more emphasis
in our media education curriculum on promoting alternatives
to the screen, based on our research finding that active play
is what most kids prefer to do anyway. Well in BC anyway which
has the lowest rates of TV use and most active kids in Canada
anyway.
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