Background: High school students involved in athletics may face additional stressors and engage in more problematic behaviors, such as drinking, dieting, and gambling, than non-athletes, especially as they near the end of their high school experience. Studies have, in general, found mixed results as to whether sports serve a protective factor or…

Background: To improve understanding of the mechanisms affecting the relationship between adolescent obesity and poor academic performance, we examined the association of overweight or perceived weight status with academic achievement. Methods: We performed a cross-sectional study of 14-17-year-olds (N = 11,012) from the nationally representative…

Recent psycholinguistic findings showed that (a) a multi-modal phonetic training paradigm that encodes visual, interactive information is more effective in training L2 learners' perception of novel categories, (b) decreasing the acoustic variance of a phonetic dimension allows the learners to more effectively shift the perceptual weight towards…

In this article we reply to C. J. Ferguson and J. Kilburn's (2010) critique of our meta-analysis on violent video game effects (C. A. Anderson et al., 2010). We rely on well-established methodological and statistical theory and on empirical data to show that claims of bias and misinterpretation on our part are simply wrong. One should not…

In June 2011 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that video games enjoy full free speech protections and that the regulation of violent game sales to minors is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court also referred to psychological research on violent video games as "unpersuasive" and noted that such research contains many methodological flaws.…

This study is an exploratory study of the relationship between collaboration and mathematics and game outcomes in a video game aimed at teaching concepts related to rational numbers. The sample included 243 middle school students who played the video game either with one partner or individually for 40 minutes. Results suggest that participants…

Based on PISA 2009 data, this article studies the relationship between students' computer use and their achievement in reading, mathematics and science in 23 countries. After having categorised computer use into a set of different activities according to the skills they involve, we correlate students' PISA test-scores with an index capturing the…

In this study, an online survey was utilized to investigate relationships among participants' willingness to cheat in academic or business settings and the strategies they tend to utilize in video game play. 113 participants completed the survey, and 86 students (23 middle school, 44 high school, 8 college undergraduate, and 11 graduate) yielded…

Twelve American Indian (AI) and 12 non-AI participants gambled on a slot-machine simulation and on video poker. Prior to the gambling sessions, half of the participants consumed alcohol while the other half consumed a placebo beverage. They then played the slot-machine simulation three times, with the percentage of programmed "near misses" varying…

This is an account of what a teacher educator learned from using the video game Neverwinter Nights with Drax, a high school student whose reading is like that of an elementary school student. Neverwinter Nights is a role-playing adventure game that requires reading print along with other meaningful signs such as sounds, artefacts, color, maps,…

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are one of the most interesting innovations in the area of online computer gaming. This pilot study set out to examine the psychological and social effects of online gaming using an online questionnaire with particular reference to excessive and "dependent" online gaming. A self-selecting…

A mixed methods design was used to identify factors associated with motivational engagement in video gaming. Self-report instruments were administered to 189 video game players to assess goal orientations, affect, need for cognition, and perceptions of engagement and flow. Simultaneously, a sub-set of 25 participants were interviewed and results…

The main purpose of this study was to assess whether seventh-grade students use of information and communication technology (ICT) was related to performance on working memory tasks. In addition, the study tested whether the relationship between ICT use and performance on working memory tasks interacted with seventh-grade students' socioeconomic…

Play is a great equalizer. It is a universal, natural human pursuit. It need not--and should not--be based on or require expensive toys. Instead, children need an atmosphere in which exploration and play are valued and encouraged, a print-rich environment in which books--these can be borrowed from a library--encourage verbal skills; materials…

The main purpose of the study was to address the association between computer games and students' academic achievement. The exceptional growth in numbers of children playing computer games, the uneasiness and incomplete understanding foundation when starting the discussion on computer games have stimulated this study to be conducted. From a survey…