Halo 3 or Hegel?

Amazingly enough, it's a live issue in the social sciences whether students' grades correlate with the hours they spend studying. The problem has to do with isolating the variable: Maybe smarter students study more -- and their intelligence, not their studiousness, makes the difference.

A startling headline in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week announced a breakthrough: "Your Parents Are Correct, Scholars Report: Studying Pays Off."[$]

The authors of a forthcoming paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research -- Todd R. Stinebrickner, an associate professor of economics at the University of Western Ontario, and his father, Ralph Stinebrickner, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Berea College -- made use of a so-called natural experiment: The random distribution of video-game consoles among Berea College freshmen.

Their reasoning went like this: Freshmen whose roommates have an XBox are likely to study less than freshmen deprived of that diversion. And freshmen whose roommates have an XBox ought to be, on average, just as intelligent and ambitious as their non-XBox-enjoying peers.

According to the Chronicle's David Glenn, the XBox's (or Wii's) presence was devastating. Students with a video-game-console-owning roomie

study 40 minutes less per day, on average, than first-year students whose roommates did not bring consoles.

And that reduction in study time has a sizable effect on grades: First-year students whose roommates brought video-game consoles earned grades that were 0.241 lower, on a 4-point scale, than did otherwise-equivalent students whose roommates did not have consoles.

Glenn quotes another scholar who suggests that perhaps video-game-console owners have other bad attributes that confound the data: They could also play loud music that makes studying in the room difficult, for example. But the Stinebrickners say there's no evidence for that. Less time, they say, simply equals worse grades.

But what about hand-eye coordination?