Jan 24, 2014 11:57 AM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

With the Internet, audio recordings, books and much more accessible on a notebook-sized portable device, parents say their kids are more often using tablets for non-educational purposes.

According to the New York Times, a new study published Friday finds that parents believe their children get more educational value from watching TV than they do from using a tablet. Some parents reason that various games and other entertainment apps inspire creativity or teach physics and engineering.

Conducted by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, the study found 57 percent of the 1,500 participating parents of children aged 2-10 believe tablets lag behind in providing educational value. The study also found that kids under 10 years old are looking at some type of screen more than ever, but it has not translated much to material deemed educational.

"While young children are spending much of their media time with educational content during their preschool years, their learning opportunities drop significantly as they get older and spend more time on mobile platforms," Dr. Michael H. Levine, Joan Ganz Cooney Center executive director, said in a press release. "As we work to raise education standards and improve students' success, we must provide higher quality media options-especially on mobile-that will help engage and educate today's older children."

The researchers said two- to four-year-olds spend the most amount of time per day on educational media at one hour and 16 minutes. As the kids grew older, that time per day shrunk to under an hour. The educational technology is there for tablets, which usually come with an app for storing books and an Internet connection giving access to all kids of information.

Although children read for an average of 40 minutes per day, only five is spent on an electronic device because parents want their kids reading in print. Therefore, whatever activity is spent on a tablet is often not reading or studying.

"This is the first study to quantify the portion of screen time that is educational," VJR Consulting president Vicky Rideout, an expert in children's media use, said in the release. "Right now, mobile media are not living up to their potential as a source of learning for kids, at least according to parents' reports."

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