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Study Finds 8-18 Year-Olds Spend 10.5 Hours a Day with Media


There is a growing disparity between youth technology consumption inside and outside of school. Reading the study “Generation M2: Media and the Lives of 8-18 Year Old,” made me realize quite how stark that disparity is. Understanding how youth are engaging with technology outside of the classroom will be key to understanding how to leverage it within the classroom to promote learning. Here are some highlights from the study:

  • 8-18 year-old spend 7.38 hours a day, seven days a week with media (TV, Internet, video games, songs, websites), this is an increase of a of 1.2 hours from 5 years ago
  • When you account for multi-tasking youth spend 10.5 hours a day with media (!)
  • For the first time since 1999 (when they started doing this research), the amount of time that young people spend watching regularly scheduled television has declined (by .25 hours a day from 3:04 to 2:39 hours). The total number of minutes watching TV or movies has actually increased (by 38 minutes) due to the proliferation of new ways of watching TV or movies on the Internet
  • 20% of media consumption occurs on mobile devices
  • For those youth who have a cell phone, they estimate they send an average of 118 text messages a day
  • On average 7th-12th graders report spending about an hour and a half (1:35) engaged in sending and receiving text messages
  • 70% of youth go online in a given day (from home 57%, school 20%, other location %14)


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