Critical Analysis of Research on Interactions Between Information Technology Use in Children

The research article by Jackson begins with hypothesizing that children at the age of 12 who interact more with information technology are more creative. There were four types of information technology that the children have interacted with; computer use, internet use, playing video games, and cell phone use. Six trained undergraduate students and one trained graduate student conducted an experiment on 491 twelve year-old children from around the state of Michigan to test this hypothesis. Of all the participants a little over half were female, one third were African American, and the rest were Caucasian. Creativity is a hard variable to measure, so the method the researchers chose to use was a method based on Guilford’s theory, the Torrance test of creativity. In this test the participants were given two tasks, each designed to give the researchers an insight into how creative these children were. The first task presented an “egg” shape on a piece of paper where the participant was to try and draw something as creative as possible involving the shape. After drawing, they were told to name their picture and write a story about it. In the second task the participant was presented with a picture of an elf-like figure next to a pool of water. The children were instructed to ask as many questions about the elf as possible to know what is happening, then they were to come up with causes of why he is there, and possibilities about what could happen next. These two tasks were then rated by the team from Michigan state university on how creative each response to the tasks was. These results were analyzed alongside questionnaires about the individual children’s variables such as technology use, socio-demographic characteristics, and...

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...research article. There was the first line that proposed that playing video games would cause kids to be more creative, but reverts back on track with the research article when clarifying that even though there is a correlation, further research must be conducted to prove a link between the two. The two articles make the reader understand that causal conclusions cannot be made because other variables could be at work, and results in more creativity. For example, in this experiment a child’s creativity could be not only related to the time spent playing video games, but to the game itself. Do the worlds in which we place ourselves in, the game worlds, the reasons for which children score high on creativity tests. This could be the third variable; it’s not the time spent, but the time spent in the right video game world that will increase a child’s creativity.