The effects of video games on students mental health and school performance
Video games have become more popular for a variety of reasons such as allowing people to escape from the real world, the ability to compete either against a computer or another person, to be able to create their own stores and a multitude of other reasons (Morris, 2021). This blog will be discussing the effects of video games on adolescent students’ mental health and performance in school. The blog post will be discussing a series of 4 articles related to either performance or mental wellbeing of students who play video games. Through understanding the effects of video games on students, teachers will be able to assist them in getting help when they need it. Mental health in students can be an issue, 20% of adolescents reported high or very high levels of psychological distress, 14% of adolescents experienced a mental disorder and in 2019 there were 461 suicides by young people (AIHW, 2021). With these numbers, it is important for teachers to assist their students, and research has suggested that social media use along with video games can affect a student’s mental well-being (Mayo Clinic, 2022).
This blog focuses on a series of 4 articles. The first article discussed is by Coyne et al. (2020) who studies the effect of video games on student and the pathological symptoms that they may or may not have. David et al. (2020) researched the effect of serious video games on promoting student mental health and the potential health behaviour change in children who played said video games. Gómez-Gonzalvo et al. (2020) focused on academic performance of video gaming students and if these results changed depending on how active a video game player they were. The final main article in this blog post is by Stockdale and Coyne (2018) focused their research on video game addiction in emerging adulthood. These articles will be analysed within the following blog posts along with further research articles to discuss the results of the papers and their accuracies.