Television Viewing and High School Mathematics Achievement: A Neural Network Analysis

This study examines the relationship between mathematics achievement and television viewing. The data consist of 13,542 high school seniors from the High School and Beyond project conducted by U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. A feed-forward neural network is employed as a nonlinear model. A curvilinear relationship is found, independent of viewer characteristics, parental background, parental involvement, and leisure activities, with a peak at about one hour of viewing, and persistent upon the inclusion of statistical errors. It is further shown that for low-ability students the curvilinearity is replaced with an entirely positive correlation across all hours of television viewing.