Examining profiles of U.S. children’s screen time and associations with academic skills

ABSTRACT

Children’s screen time (ST) increased in recent years, but investigations of the content and context (e.g., parental presence, and device type) of ST in predicting early academic skills remains understudied. In this study of 127 four- and five-year-olds, we examined whether the educational content and contextual information about children’s ST from time diary interviews at age 4 predicted direct assessments of academic skills at age five. Cluster analyses detected three unique groups: Cluster One was “lowest ST and highest non-educational TV, with little parental presence,” Cluster Two was “moderate ST and highest educational mobile devices, with moderate parental presence,” and Cluster Three was “highest total ST and moderate educational ST and high parental presence.” Children in Cluster Two scored significantly higher in literacy skills at age five than peers in Cluster One and Cluster Three. Children in Cluster One scored significantly higher in spatial skills compared to those in Cluster Three. No significant associations were detected between children’s ST and number skills. Findings suggest that educational content and contextual features of ST combine in meaningful ways and appear to better predict children’s literacy and spatial skills compared to variable-centered approaches. Methodological implications of this research and future directions are discussed.

Impact Summary

Prior State of Knowledge: Excessive screen time has negative developmental outcomes for young children. However, extant research has also demonstrated the benefits of screen time that is educational, involves parental presence, and is interactive.

Novel Contributions: Utilizing time diaries, we provide rich descriptions of the content (e.g., educational and non-educational) and context (e.g., parental presence during ST and use of mobile devices) of children’s screen time. Through cluster analysis, we examine how these features naturally co-occur and predict academic skills.

Practical Implications: Screen time features work together to predict academic skills better than total screen time alone. This work suggests that researchers should consider more than total screen time to predict academic skills.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic skills
• screen time
• cluster analysis
• educational media
• preschool

Acknowledgments

Primary funding for this research reported in this publication was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01HD093689 awarded to Linsah Coulanges as part of a supplementary award under the parent grant (1 R01 HD093689-01A1) awarded to Heather J. Bachman, Melissa Libertus, and Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal. This project also benefited from intellectual synergies stemming from several related studies funded by the National Science Foundation (Award Number: 1920545), an internal award from the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, and a Scholar Award from the James S. McDonnell Foundation to Melissa Libertus.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the NICHD, the NSF, the LRDC, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, or the reviewers. We thank our project team for all their assistance with data collection and coding. A special thank you is also extended to the community partners that assisted our recruitment efforts and the children and families who participated in the Parents Promoting Early Learning (PPEL) project.

We would also like to thank JOCAM editors and the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17482798.2024.2327021

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [1 R01 HD093689-01A1].

Notes on contributors

Linsah Coulanges

Linsah Coulanges is a Ph.D. candidate of Developmental Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. She is broadly interested in understanding ways to promote academic achievement and skills for young children of diverse backgrounds. She has specific interests in leveraging tools, like digital media and educational screen-based programming, to help bolster children’s academic skills and achievement.

Heather J. Bachman

Heather Bachman is a Professor of Health and Human Development in the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research agenda centers on early academic and social development, family and classroom processes, and policy-relevant research with children from low-income households. Her research is informed by multidisciplinary perspectives including developmental psychology, education, sociology, and economics.

Melissa Libertus

Melissa Libertus is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and a Research Scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Most of her research focuses on the development of mathematical cognition, how non-symbolic number concepts support the acquisition of symbolic number concepts, and the role that parents play in children’s acquisition of math concepts. In addition, she studies the neural bases of mathematical cognition in both children and adults using electroencephalography and magnetic resonance imaging.

Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal

Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal is Chair and Professor of Psychology and Senior Scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. The goal of her research program is to strengthen understanding of how dimensions of socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity shape opportunities for healthy growth and development across the life course.