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Worries About Child Development with the Influence of Technology

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As technology becomes more influential in the lives of this generation’s children, worries and wonders have aroused about the affects these devices will have on their development. A recent study organized by researchers at Michigan State University’s Children and Technology Project tested the relationship informational technology may have with creativity in young children. The two articles, Information technology use and creativity: Findings from the Children and Technology Project, by Linda A. Jackson (lead investigator) and Research: Video games help with creativity in boys and girls, by Mike Snider, discuss the ground breaking discoveries made by the MSU project about the existence of a positive causal relationship between creative …show more content…

The goal of the stimulus activities was to measure creativity without influencing generalized intelligence through verbal/written interactions. In one activity, participants were asked to use their imagination and visually expand on a single circle. The instructions only stated to be as interesting and exciting as possible, then assign a title, and write a story about his or her finished product. In another activity the participants were given an image and asked to develop as many questions regarding what could possibly be going on, potential beginnings and endings to the image, est. After these two creative studies, each participate was asked to fill out a survey indicating the how often they use cell phones, internet, computer games, and video games, on a scale of one to seven. After gathering all information, six trained graduate students carefully ranked the level of creativity each participant exhibited in the activities (one to three scale). Each participant’s final score was averaged between the six graders, and adopted a significance level of .01 in order to minimize the probability of Type 1 errors. The MSU project committee was so interested in the final results, they decided to further analyze the potential relationships between creativity and gender, age, ethnicity, or family income and whether those factors varied among video game genre. Jackson sums up the astounding discoveries by saying, “Results of our research indicate

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