The acceleration point for both age groups studied is 2012. What happened that year? The article doesn't try to answer this. Might be mentioned in the study I suppose.
What you see is that before the anomaly year that was 2020, the scores were slightly lower as compared to 2012, but they were still not as low as early 2000s or before.
Another thing to notice is that the higher percentile performance largely remains flat but lower percentiles seem to be suffering from a drop.
While social media and phones could be a part of it, if they were the only factors, we wouldn’t see such a disparity between different percentiles. I suspect educational policy. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), no matter how controversial, coincided with the improvements in the scores. In 2012, a bunch of states were allowed to have more flexibility from NCLB. In 2015, it was replaced with Every Student Succeeds Act which allowed states to set their own standards. I think this was the single biggest contributor to the declining scores.
Instagram/Android was 2012. (Instagram iOS was late 2010). But not just Instagram; 2012 was about the time that social media really started adopting the dark patterns.
Up until the 2010s I think it was still a lot less socially normal to play a lot of games. We reached a tipping point somewhere that went from gaming being a sometimes activity for kids to basically every kid plays games
Most of the people in my high school in the 2000s didn't play games as a primary hobby. Only a few of my friends had a PC for games or a console. It wasn't nearly as ubiquitous as it is now.
The release of the Xbox coincided with what I viewed as a big jump in video game players. Even the biggest athletic jocks played a ton of Halo. And then not long after that saw much older people start playing games like CoD:MW as after work entertainment instead of just tv.
Kinda, the measurement points are 2012 and 2020, so the decline is somewhere in that eight year period (birth years 1999-2007 and 2003-2011). My guess is phones/tablets strike again.
Anecdotally, 2012 is when I got back in to reading for pleasure, as a 16-year-old. I had no friends though, and thought someone cute might see me reading and become interested in me.
Prior to that, I stopped reading because video games were easy to get lost in endlessly. At the time, I recall I was probably playing a lot of League of Legends, TF2, Minecraft, and probably some others -- all of which I felt I could pretty much sink an infinite amount of time into, at the time.
What you see is that before the anomaly year that was 2020, the scores were slightly lower as compared to 2012, but they were still not as low as early 2000s or before.
Another thing to notice is that the higher percentile performance largely remains flat but lower percentiles seem to be suffering from a drop.
While social media and phones could be a part of it, if they were the only factors, we wouldn’t see such a disparity between different percentiles. I suspect educational policy. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), no matter how controversial, coincided with the improvements in the scores. In 2012, a bunch of states were allowed to have more flexibility from NCLB. In 2015, it was replaced with Every Student Succeeds Act which allowed states to set their own standards. I think this was the single biggest contributor to the declining scores.