We find strong evidence against the view that childhood tele- vision viewing harms the cognitive or educational development of preschoolers. Our preferred point estimate indicates that an additional year of preschool television exposure raises average adolescent test scores by about standard deviations. We are able to reject negative effects larger than about standard deviations per year of television exposure. 3 For reading and gen- eral knowledge scores—domains where intuition and existing ev- idence suggest that learning from television could be important— the positive effects we find aremarginally statistically significant. In addition, we present evidence on the extent to which childhood viewing affects later noncognitive outcomes such as time spent on homework.
