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The Educational Impact of Television

Understanding Television's Potential and Limitations

Daniel R. Anderson, Heather J. Lavigne, and Katherine G. Hanson

Television as an Educational Tool

Even before television was first broadcast as a mass medium, commentators expressed hopes and fears about its impact on education. On the one hand, TV could be a window to the world, and on the other, it could be an endless distraction from productive and sustained learning. This debate has hardly waned more than 60 years later – in fact, it has been extended to other electronic media. In this chapter, we review the current state of understanding about children's learning from television. Our review here is limited: we only consider the impact of television programs, such as Sesame Street or Blue's Clues, that intentionally incorporate a curriculum in their design with specific educational objectives aimed at fostering cognitive, social, academic or school-readiness skills among its viewers. That is, we do not review research on the effects of purely entertainment programming (for a review see Chapter 28, this volume). We also do not review research on the use of educational television in the classroom or other formal learning situations. Instead, we focus on educational television that is experienced at home during so-called “informal learning.”

We first provide a brief task analysis of television viewing in order to highlight cognitive skills necessary for comprehension and learning (see Anderson & Hanson, 2010 for a detailed analysis). For infants, television comprehension is a demanding task and is probably beyond their capabilities, even when considering educational programs and baby videos. We argue that only after about 2 years of age can TV truly become educational. Consequently, we divide the research literature into educational television impact before and after the age of 2 years.

The Task of Watching Television

The Medium

Watching television is not akin to watching events unfold through a window. Even with large-screen high-definition displays, televised events are confined to a restricted space that is visually and auditorily inferior to equivalent real-life experiences. Television screens fail to give us the sense of depth and “presence” found in everyday life. For example, TV does not afford its viewers with binocular depth perception, which arises from the brain's ability to extract distance information from the slightly disparate views of our two eyes when we look in three-dimensional space. Especially for infants and toddlers, television's impoverished images can lead to poorer encoding, retention, and transfer of information to everyday life.

Television is also limited because it cannot provide its viewers with contingent and responsive feedback. It is widely theorized, with empirical support, that very young children learn best through hands-on experience, actively manipulating objects in their environment as well as engaging with people in their world (Piaget, 1952; Vygotsky, 1978). In turn, these interactive experiences provide children with the knowledge to adaptively modify their future behaviors. This behaviorally active learning process is constrained during television viewing.

The Codes of Television

Television programs are structured by a set of conventions that organize the audiovisual flow of sounds and images into a coherent narrative. To media researchers, the audiovisual production and editing techniques, such as sound effects, pacing, and dissolves, are known as the formal features of television. These features are effectively the grammar and syntax of television that mark scene and content changes, while fostering continuity across these changes (Huston & Wright, 1983). Formal features have an informative function ranging from calling attention to a particular part of the screen to simulating cognitive processes such as paying close attention to a detail (as in a shift to a close-up shot). Auditory changes and fast-pace motion tend to attract attention to the TV if the viewer is looking away (Alwitt, Anderson, Lorch, & Levin, 1980). Editing techniques can signal a change in perspective (as from one character's point of view to another) or a change in time and space (dissolves to infer a change in time). The interpretation of transitions calls upon prior experience with the medium, general world knowledge, and complex cognitive skills including an understanding of continuity in action sequences, time, point of view, and intentions, to name a few. Consequently, young children's ability to learn from television can be compromised by their limited cognitive abilities and lack of experience with the world in general and with television in particular. However, well-designed children's programs use specific production and editing techniques to support children's learning from television. For example, simply minimizing the number of transitions can help reduce children's cognitive load and possible confusion (Anderson, 2004).

Attention to Television

It is a misconception that children are mesmerized by television. In fact, they pay widely varying amounts of attention to TV, depending on a variety of factors. A typical viewer of Sesame Street, for example, will look at and away from the screen about 150 times in the course of an episode (e.g., Anderson, Lorch, Field, & Sanders, 1981). To learn from television, therefore, children need to look and listen at the right times in order to fully understand the narrative or lesson. They must also look at the most informative place on the screen during each portion of the program. The process of learning how to watch television is reflected in the increase in looking at TV across early childhood. Looking at television increases with age as children gain more control over their ability to selectively allocate their attention during the first five years of life (Ruff & Rothbart, 1996). It also increases as children become capable of understanding television content (Pempek et al., 2010).

Higher-Level Comprehension of Television

Children must not only learn how to decode the forms and features of television, but they must also understand the educational material presented on television. High-level comprehension of program content requires cognitive skills ranging from basic comprehension of language to comprehension of stories (e.g., story structure and components, character motivations, cause and effect, etc.).

Since children usually watch TV to be entertained and not educated, learning is often incidental rather than intentional. Fisch (2000) proposed that the two types of content – entertainment and education – result in two parallel streams of cognitive processing that place separate demands on children's limited working memory. Therefore, greater integration between the entertainment and education content within a television program will reduce the cognitive demands of viewing and bolster children's comprehension.

In summary, to create meaningful programming for children, there must be an appreciation of the complexities involved in watching television. For adults, watching television is a relatively easy activity; however, for young children, watching television is challenging given that they are limited in their cognitive abilities, real-world knowledge, and experience with the medium. Thus, for a television program to have a positive impact, the production team should undertake program development with an understanding of children's developmental abilities and perspectives.

Television Viewing among Infants and Toddlers

In 1998, Teletubbies debuted on PBS. It was the first television series made specifically for infants and toddlers. Since then, infant-directed television series and videos, such as the highly popular Baby Einstein videos, have become a multibillion dollar industry (Garrison & Christakis, 2005). Recent studies indicate that children begin to watch and are regularly exposed to television around nine months of age (Linebarger & Walker, 2005). Approximately 61% of infants under the age of two watch television on a daily basis, consuming an average of one to two hours each day (Rideout & Hamel, 2006).

Many baby videos and TV programs have made either explicit or implicit claims to enhance children's cognitive development (e.g., Brainy Baby series). However, unlike educational programs for preschool children and older, there are no available studies to support the producers' claims. In fact, a handful of studies have tested the educational efficacy of baby videos and have not found any developmental or learning benefits. In a naturalistic study, for example, Robb, Richert, and Wartella (2009) provided families of 12- to 15-month-olds with an infant-directed video, Baby Wordsmith, to view in the home over a 6-week period. Although this video features word learning, infants who viewed the video did not increase their receptive or expressive language with featured words relative to infants who were not exposed to the video.

Moreover, it is unclear how much infants and toddlers actually comprehend from infant-directed videos given the complexities involved in watching television. Although infants are born with a relatively precocious auditory system, their visual system at birth is poor with limited visual acuity, color and contrast perception, and object tracking, to name a few (see Slater, 2001 for a review). At least for several months after birth, it is unlikely that infants can perceive much on a television screen at a typical viewing distance. Despite these early perceptual immaturities, there are many baby videos targeting infants as young as three months. By six months, however, the infant visual system is mature enough to see the television screen. At this age they can also recognize objects, characters, and actions on screen, and match the audio track to the visual stimuli (e.g., Tincoff & Jusczyk, 1999). Nevertheless, even with these perceptual abilities, infants' ability to learn from television is compromised by their limited cognitive abilities and lack of experience.

We are just beginning to understand the extent to which infants comprehend television. As an example, Pempek and colleagues (2010) showed 6-, 12-, 18-, and 24-month-olds comprehensible and incomprehensible versions of Teletubbies. All children watched a 10-minute comprehensible version of Teletubbies. In addition, half of the children viewed a version of Teletubbies that consisted of the same shots placed in random order, while the other half viewed a version of Teletubbies that was linguistically distorted (each utterance was reversed). Six- and twelve-month-olds did not discriminate among these different versions in terms of their attention. Only at 18 months of age did it seem to matter to the infants whether the program made sequential or linguistic sense. It is likely that the cognitive mechanisms important for basic TV comprehension skills (e.g., linguistic comprehension and comprehending the relationships between successive shots) are not available until about 18 months of age and older.

Does Television Have an Educational Impact on Infants?

Much of the current research on infants' learning focuses on their inability to learn from screen media. Even with simple unadorned video used for research, children under 2 years demonstrate a deficit in learning from television compared to learning from an equivalent live display. This phenomenon is known as the video deficit (Anderson & Pempek, 2005). Young children for example, are less likely to imitate simple behaviors from television, like putting a rattle together, relative to watching someone put it together in person (e.g., Barr & Hayne, 1999). A number of theories have been proposed to account for the video deficit; none of them are mutually exclusive, and all highlight the complexity involved in TV viewing.

One account of the video deficit emphasizes the perceptual impoverishment of television relative to real-life experiences (Schmitt & Anderson, 2002). Compared to live demonstrations, televised displays lack the dynamic and perceptual richness of everyday life resulting in potentially weaker mental representations (Schmitt, 1997). These perceptual differences may make it particularly difficult for children to transfer knowledge from television to reality. There is some evidence that differences in dimensional space result in poorer transfer of knowledge across dimensions (2D to 3D or 3D to 2D), but not within the same dimensional space (2D to 2D or 3D to 3D; Zack, Barr, Gerhardstein, Dickerson, & Meltzoff, 2009). Another study by Carver and colleagues (Carver, Meltzoff, & Dawson, 2006) found that 18-month-old infants reliably discriminated between familiar and unfamiliar objects in both video (2D) and live (3D) conditions. Nevertheless, infants took longer to process familiarity differences during the video presentation compared to the live presentation, suggesting that young children need more time to encode information from video.

Another theory posits that infants and toddlers may not learn as much from television because they do not have an appreciation of its symbolic nature (Troseth & Deloache, 1998). That is, they do not understand the fact that television provides symbolic (or more accurately iconic) representations of objects and events that may (or may not) exist in the real world. This results in a failure to understand the correspondence between television and reality, an ability that does not reliably emerge until about three years.

Attention differences may also contribute to the video deficit. Children may find video presentations less engaging than real-life presentations (Diener, Pierroutsakos, Troseth, & Roberts, 2008). As a result, they may pay less attention to television and be more likely to miss key pieces of information necessary for comprehension. Furthermore, even if young children pay attention to the video, it does not mean that they are paying attention to the right thing at the right time. Using eye-tracking methodology, Kirkorian, Anderson, and Keen (2008) found that one-year-olds' attention to what they look at while viewing a Sesame Street segment is highly variable across infants compared to four-year-olds and adults, who were more likely to look at the same thing at the same time. The older viewers are more likely to look at informative aspects of the display based on their understanding of the program.

Although infants and toddlers have difficulty learning from television, there are techniques that can be used to ameliorate the video deficit. Repeating content can support young children's learning by providing them with more opportunities to encode information (Barr, Muentener, & Garcia, 2007). In addition, verbal labeling, either through voiceover or with a coviewing parent, helps children by scaffolding the viewing experience, highlighting important events onscreen (Brand & Tapscott, 2007). The viewing context and experience with television as a source of information are also important factors in reducing the video deficit. Two-year-old children, for example, performed worse on a simple imitation task when they viewed the demonstration on a television set at home compared to children who saw the same video demonstration in the laboratory (Strouse & Troseth, 2008). In contrast, those infants presented with a live demonstration (either at home or in the lab) did not differ in performance. This difference between home and the novel context of the laboratory may result from children's experience with television at home as essentially being irrelevant to their real-life experiences. In addition to viewing context, establishing an interactive relationship with young viewers through video also facilitates children's learning (Troseth, Saylor, & Archer, 2006). Relatedly, Lauricella, Howard, and Calvert (2010) found that with 21-month-olds, a familiar TV puppet was a more effective model for demonstrating nesting cups than an unfamiliar TV puppet.

Finally, coviewing with a parent may be an important factor in infant learning from television. Lemish and Rice (1986) found that television viewing can be a rich experience between parents and children, similar to book reading. Barr and colleagues (Barr, Zack, Garcia, & Muentener, 2008) found that parents who labeled objects on screen (“That's green”) and questioned their children (“Where is the dog?”) while viewing had young toddlers who attended to and responded more to the television program.

That said, the research literature still lacks any demonstration that children under 2 years of age actually learn anything of value from watching commercial television programs or videos (in contrast to some demonstrations of infant learning from simple research videos). In fact, there has been little rigorous research to evaluate baby videos specifically designed to be educational. Moreover, video viewing by infants is a matter of some controversy. Recent correlational studies are suggestive that early television exposure during infancy is related to poorer cognitive outcomes (Anderson & Pempek, 2005). Furthermore, the American Academy of Pediatrics (1999) recommends that children under 2 years have no screen exposure based on the assumption that TV viewing displaces important social interactions necessary for development.

In summary, television viewing is an active and complex task that requires cognitive maturation and real-world experience. Not surprisingly, very young children have difficulties learning from television. Although there are techniques that support infant and toddler learning from television, there is very little research to show that they learn anything of substance.

Preschoolers and Television

During the preschool years (2 to 5), consumption of screen media greatly increases and then remains high throughout later childhood and the teenage years (Rideout, Vandewater, & Wartella, 2003). With age from infancy to the school-age years, TV viewing encompasses a wider variety of content, moving from predominantly child programming to general audience and adult programming. In a survey conducted in 2005, it was reported that 82% of 3- to 4-year-olds and 78% of 5- to 6-year-olds watched television on any given day (Vandewater et al., 2007). Viewing does not just happen at home; preschool children in home-based childcare programs watch approximately four times as much television than those in center-based programs (1.39 hours per day versus .36 hours per day; Christakis, Garrison, & Zimmerman, 2007).

Once established, media consumption patterns from childhood are consistent throughout life. Those children that are “heavy viewers” will most likely continue to be heavy media users later in life (Rideout et al., 2003). Educational television probably has its greatest influence during the preschool years because most children watch substantial amounts of TV, they are not yet engaged in formal schooling, and they have become capable of understanding well-designed educational programs. In addition, brain development continues at a rapid pace during the preschool years with the consolidation of many basic cognitive abilities occurring during this time.

Preschoolers' TV Viewing: A Task Analysis

As indicated above, the act of watching television becomes easier with greater capabilities in cognitive control and comprehension. With maturation, preschoolers can rapidly process the formal features of television and also recognize television as a relevant source of information.

Auditory Attention

Based on videotapes recorded in homes, preschoolers spend a third of their time or more when watching TV doing things other than looking at the screen (Anderson, Lorch, Collins, Field, & Nathan, 1986). Often, preschoolers divide their attention between television and other activities such as toy play. Because a great deal of information critical to comprehension is presented via the audio track, it is important to determine to what extent children listen to the TV when they are not looking.

Lorch, Anderson, and Levin (1979) found that 5-year-olds' recall of auditory content was better if they were looking at the television at the time the auditory content was presented. Field and Anderson (1985) found the same linkage between looking and listening in 5-year-olds, but found that the linkage was reduced in older children. That is, older television viewers appear to be more capable of listening while they are visually attending to something else. This multitasking behavior, of course, becomes the initial basis for the increasingly common use of multiple media at the same time, especially by teenagers.

Visual Attention

Television viewers (young and old) do not just stare at the TV screen. Rather, they look at and away from the screen many times during the course of a viewing session. The sporadic nature of looking at television can be observed even when the viewer is not engaged in a concurrent activity. An important aspect of modern production of educational television for children, therefore, is an appreciation of this fact. Consequently, production strategies are used to attract the viewer's attention at critical times necessary for comprehension of the key messages.

Of particular importance in getting and holding the attention of young children, is that the program must be comprehensible. That is, the dialogue and narration should use age-appropriate vocabulary, the plot structure should not be complex, the setting interpretable within the experience of a young child, and the editing should demand as little inference as possible. When full attention is critical for comprehension, sound effects or other formal features should be judiciously employed to elicit attention from those members of the audience who are inattentive. It is also important to design the program so that children readily recognize that the program is intended for them. This can be done by using common features that are characteristic of children's programs including “enhanced reality” (bright colors in set design), and the use of animation, puppets, child characters, and the like. Features such as these have been repeatedly found to be associated with enhanced attention in child viewers (Alwitt et al., 1980).

Other factors such as humorous content can increase attention and information acquisition. Zillmann and colleagues (Zillmann, Williams, Bryant, Boynton, & Wolf, 1980) found that unrelated humorous inserts increased 5- and 6-year-olds' looking to the television and memory of educational messages; although it should be noted that the best practice is to try to integrate the humor with the educational content (Fisch, 2000). In general, of course, storylines and content that preschool children find engaging are essential for sustaining attention and interest (for example, saving baby animals forms the core basis of the plotlines for the highly popular Go, Diego, Go!).

Comprehension

After they reach the age of 2 years, children become capable of learning from TV. Improvements in children's language and narrative skills make television content more comprehensible, thus improving understanding of plotlines (Linebarger & Piotrowski, 2009). Children begin to comprehend that television is an iconic and symbolic medium; that it represents characters, objects, and events that are not present in the real world but also that it can represent real people, objects, and events. They begin to make distinctions between what is real and not real on television, recognizing for example that animation is not real (Dorr, 1983). That said, preschool children love to act “as if” they are participants in a TV program, particularly when the program invites their participation. Invited audience participation was part of the success of the highly popular Blue's Clues (Anderson, 2004). It has now become a common device used in many preschool programs.

Television viewing requires an implicit understanding of the meaning of production techniques used to show changes in scene, character perspective, and time. For example, when depicting an important meeting in the Oval Office, program producers might show an establishment shot of the exterior of the White House to allude to the location of this interaction. Generally, these types of editing and film techniques are known as cinematic montage (Monaco, 1981). By age 4, children begin to understand elements of montage. Four-year-olds can interpret simple transition sequences, point-of-view camera shots, and actions that are not explicitly shown but implied to the audience (e.g., the viewer may infer that a cartoon character got a spanking from a parent if he was yelled at in a previous shot and in the next, the character is shown rubbing his backside). Though preschool children show some comprehension of the basic elements of montage, understanding has been found to further improve in 7- year-old children and beyond (Smith, Anderson, & Fischer, 1985). These advancements can be attributed to children's growing base of life experiences (including TV viewing), increasing ability to appreciate transformations in time and space, and increasing awareness of their own and others' thoughts and unique perspectives (for example, correctly interpreting a point-of-view shot).

Towards the end of the preschool years, programming format and familiarity can increase children's comprehension. By this age, children are able to understand plots that follow a linear progression with no subplots and character activity involving concrete actions (Pingree et al., 1984). Children also begin to develop their own preferences for programs, becoming regular viewers of particular series. This familiarity with particular programs has been found to improve comprehension (Crawley et al., 2002).

Educational Programming

One of the cornerstones of an effective educational program is a thoughtfully designed curriculum. Sesame Street, more than any other program, is the pioneer in preschool educational programming. As part of its original creation, and as part of its continuing production, program producers, child development specialists, educators, and researchers engage in collaboration (Lesser, 1977). Educators and child development experts design the underlying curriculum (which varies somewhat from year to year), writers create content that incorporates the curriculum, and researchers test versions of that content to determine appeal, comprehensibility, and learning. Based on “formative” research with children, the content may be revised or abandoned if any aspect of appeal, comprehensibility, or learning is lacking (Fisch & Truglio, 2001). If an educational program was developed with federal funding, “summative” research may also be done. Summative research is conducted on completed episodes or even on an entire season or two of the program. It is usually done with a large sample of children and involves a formal research design and data analysis. Continued federal funding of the program may well depend on the findings from the summative research.

Unfortunately, most formative research and some summative research (especially if it is done by a commercial network) are proprietary, and unavailable for review. In addition, many summative research studies are not published in archival form and may be difficult to obtain. However, through a combination of evaluations shared by producers and additional empirical work of academic researchers, it is possible to examine the effectiveness of various types of programming. Below is a short review of preschoolers' cognitive and social learning from educational television (for a more extensive review, see Fisch, 2004).

Learning from Educational Programming

Because it was the first widely viewed educational TV program, and because of its longevity (first broadcast in 1969), Sesame Street provides the most information about the effects of educational television viewing. The evidence shows positive effects from studies of exposure to single episodes to studies of sustained, repeated viewing of the series (Fisch, 2004).

Short-term research is usually concerned with whether children actually comprehend and learn the content in particular episodes. In one experimental study, for example, Hodapp (1977) showed that a single exposure to a Sesame Street segment resulted in preschoolers' increased ability to apply the same problem-solving strategy seen in the segment. However, these same children did not apply the strategy to a similar task in a different context. Single, brief exposures can promote the literal use of information, but application of the knowledge across contexts may be limited.

Repeated viewings improve children's ability to recall story plots, crucial details, and extract abstract problem-solving skills. For example, in a study of Blue's Clues by Crawley and colleagues (Crawley, Anderson, Wilder, Williams, & Santomero, 1999), children who saw an episode five times not only remembered more of the educational content than children who saw the episode once, but they also showed substantially more transfer of problem-solving concepts to new contexts. It is worth noting that attention to the episode of Blue's Clues did not substantially diminish over five viewings, and in addition, audience participation (pointing at the screen, yelling answers to questions, etc.) increased with repetition.

Following the first season of Sesame Street, an evaluation assessed the impact of viewing on the school-readiness skills of preschoolers. Results showed that, over the 26-month period of assessment, children who viewed Sesame Street most frequently showed the greatest gains in sorting skills, knowledge of numbers and letters, and other cognitive skills (Ball & Bogatz, 1970). Follow-up studies concluded that frequent viewers were later rated by their teachers as better prepared for school than the less-frequent viewers in the sample (Bogatz & Ball, 1972). It should be pointed out that these early summative evaluations were not true experiments insofar as children were not randomly assigned to watch Sesame Street or to be non-viewers. Consequently, it is possible that children who were more drawn to watch Sesame Street were different from those who were less attracted to the show. Such studies are always open to the criticism that the evidence in favor of the show is not conclusive (e.g., Cook et al., 1975).

Subsequent studies indicated that viewing predicted increased vocabulary (Rice, Huston, Truglio, & Wright, 1990), improved school readiness (Zill, 2001), and better performance on math and scholastic achievement tests (Fisch, Truglio, & Cole, 1999). One study investigated long-term impact beyond the preschool years. Anderson and colleagues (Anderson, Huston, Schmitt, Linebarger, & Wright, 2001) recontacted 570 high school students who had been previously studied as preschoolers. In the original studies, detailed viewing diaries kept by parents indicated what programs the children watched. In the later “recontact” study, the by-then high school students were interviewed and their high school transcripts were obtained. Preschool viewing of educational television, particularly Sesame Street, was associated with higher grades in English, science, and mathematics. Educational viewing was also associated with greater leisure-time reading of books. In addition, Sesame Street viewers, when in high school, placed higher value on their academic performance, and tended to have higher levels of academic self-esteem. To summarize, Sesame Street, the longest-running and most-studied educational television program, provides both short- and long-term evidence that its viewers learn from the program and that this learning better prepares them for school. In turn, this preschool preparation is associated with positive consequences traceable at least through high school.

Inspired by the success of Sesame Street, (as well as audience ratings and sale of licensed products), Nickelodeon set out to design a new educational program to compete with those found on public television. Blue's Clues was designed to teach cognitive and social problem-solving skills to preschoolers. The program design was based on research findings from studies done since Sesame Street was first broadcast. Whereas Sesame Street was designed on the assumption that children's attention had to be maintained by frequent changes in image and content (Lesser, 1972), the design of Blue's Clues was based on the presumption that children are cognitively active and engaged in thinking about the content and story line. It was also based on the idea that editing transitions provide a cognitive burden to young viewers. Finally, it made the presumption that given the opportunity, young viewers would be behaviorally and verbally interactive with the show if they were given the invitation to do so (Anderson, 2004). Following these ideas, the show provided a continuous storyline punctuated by solving problems posed by characters encountered during the search for “clues” to solve the main problem. The entire episode is produced with only three or four transitions that require viewer inference, and even these are clearly marked for the audience. Embedded within the format of the show is an interactive exchange between the host and the viewer, as he asks questions like, “What do we do when we find a clue?” (audience response: “Put it in our handy-dandy notebook”). Through pointing, making gestures, and calling out answers, the audience is encouraged to actively participate in the problem-solving activities.

In a study spanning two years of children's exposure to Blue's Clues, regular viewers performed better than non-viewers on problem-solving tasks seen on the show as well as solving riddles that were not presented on the show (Bryant et al., 1999; Crawley et al., 2002). Other series such as Allegra's Window and Gullah Gullah Island have also been found to promote some types of problem solving (Fisch, 2004).

Children who do not develop basic literacy skills such as letter recognition by the time they enter school are three to four times more likely to drop out of school in subsequent years (Kirsch, Jungeblut, Jenkins, & Kolstad, 2002). Therefore, literacy has been a target content area for preschool educational television programs. One such program is Super Why! a series targeted at children ages 3 to 6 that promotes skills such as alphabet and word knowledge, comprehension, spelling, and an understanding of basic story structure. Linebarger, McMenamin, and Wainright (2008) randomly assigned children to watch either Super Why! or a control educational program (that did not teach literacy skills) over the course of eight weeks. After a mid- and final assessment, results indicated that children who watched Super Why! exhibited significant growth on targeted early literacy skills such as letter knowledge, phonological and phonemic awareness, and language development.

Educational television can influence a variety of skills and knowledge areas. For example, programs such as The Electric Company, Barney & Friends, Dora the Explorer, and The Puzzle Place have been found to play positive roles in language and second-language development (Fisch, 2004). Other types of positive influences on cognitive growth include appreciation for music and the arts, general knowledge, and appreciation of diversity, among others.

An aspect of school readiness is to prepare children with social skills such as taking turns, sharing, and the like. Preschool children must also learn to recognize and evaluate their own and others' emotional states in order to effectively apply social skills. Additionally, children must learn self-control in the face of strong emotions. Such social and emotional learning is the curriculum target of many educational TV programs directed at preschool children. In a meta-analysis of 34 studies examining the prosocial effects of television, Mares and Woodard (2005) found that children in both experimental and home observation studies who viewed prosocial programming behaved in a more prosocial manner and held more positive attitudes towards measures such as altruism and social interactions as compared to other children (see Chapter 30). The results of these analyses also suggest that prosocial television has as much influence on positive social behavior as aggressive or violent programming has for negative behaviors.

The primary goal of Mister Rogers Neighborhood was to contribute to the development of preschoolers' social and emotional life skills. After watching the series over a four-week period as compared to aggressive or neutral programming, preschool children who viewed Mister Rogers showed higher levels of self-control and persistence in a school setting as compared to children who viewed aggressive cartoons or nature programming (Friedrich & Stein, 1973). Furthermore, low-income children in particular showed improvements in verbalization of their feelings, cooperation with others, and nurturance.

Sesame Street has a broad school-readiness curriculum that includes prosocial and emotional skills as well as verbal and numerical literacy. Research indicates that Sesame Street contributes to the development of prosocial behaviors such as cooperation, sharing, and reductions in aggressive behavior (Bankart & Anderson, 1979).

Another program produced by Sesame Workshop, Dragon Tales, was created with the primary goal to foster preschool children's social and emotional skills. After multiple exposures, viewers of Dragon Tales showed a positive change in goal orientation and social relationships (Rust, 2001). Ratings from parents and teachers in this study showed that viewers of Dragon Tales scored higher on their tendencies to “choose challenging tasks,” “start or organize play with others,” “share with other children,” and “cooperate with others.”

Beyond the Preschool Years

Children's understanding of television programs continues to increase, reaching essentially adult levels by about age 12 (e.g., Collins, 1983). In the school-age years, as self-concept develops, and as they become more cognitively sophisticated, children's TV program preferences change a great deal. For example, whereas preschoolers do not care a great deal whether a character is male or female, character gender becomes important for children older than five. Boys begin to strongly prefer male characters and girls prefer female characters (Luecke-Aleksa, Anderson, Collins, & Schmitt, 1995). Reflecting cognitive development, school-age children begin to watch programs intended for adults and general audiences, whereas preschool children overwhelmingly watch children's programs. In fact, school-age children will often actively reject programs they previously watched as being “for babies” and begin substantial explorations of programs that are not educational in nature or intent. It has also been suggested that older children begin to prefer programs of higher complexity, specifically, those that possess a narrative structure and that focus more so on character interactions (Calvert & Kotler, 2003). In addition to shifts in these preferences, the authors found the overall interest in “educational” programs declines for these older children. These developments in program preferences make the creation of educational television programs for children beyond preschool a challenge.

An example of an educational program beyond preschool is Between the Lions, a PBS program designed for young school-age children to promote literacy strategies and enjoyment from reading. Research surrounding this program suggests that kindergarten viewers of this series showed higher levels of word recognition and standardized test measures as compared to non-viewers (Linebarger, Kosanic, Greenwood, & Doku, 2004). This same study found that at-risk viewers had significantly greater gains than not-at-risk youth. This suggests that educational programs may have differing impact depending on parent education, socioeconomic status, and access to resources.

The Electric Company, which targeted the improvement of literacy skills in lagging readers in the second grade, was found to improve reading skills across 19 different goal areas, with the greatest gains for first and second graders (Ball & Bogatz, 1973). Other series like Arthur, Ghostwriter, and Reading Rainbow have been found to establish an increase in school-age children's interest in reading and writing (Fisch, 2004).

Math and science programs have also received positive evaluations. Square One TV and Cyberchase enhanced positive attitudes toward mathematical learning (Fisch, 2004) and increased recall, comprehension, and children's use of problem-solving strategies (Hall, Esty, & Fisch, 1990). Among the benefits of science-based programs such as 3-2-1 Contact and Bill Nye the Science Guy are a better understanding of basic scientific knowledge and interest in scientific exploration (Cambre & Fernie, 1985; Rockman et al., 1996).

Finally, as children grow older, an understanding of civics, social studies, and current events becomes increasingly important for scholastic achievement and social competence. Child-friendly programs that have offered age-appropriate coverage of current events topics include Channel One and Nick News. These types of programs can present important knowledge to children in age-appropriate language and content.

Those children who watch educational programs clearly benefit. What is not so clear, however, is whether these programs can successfully compete with their entertainment counterparts for an audience. While preschool educational programs like Blue's Clues have been successful in terms of audience ratings, this is much less true for educational programs directed at school-age children. The challenge for the future is to get more school-age children watching educational programs.

How is Educational Television Successful?

The first step in successful educational television production is getting children to choose and pay attention to the program. Fortunately, we know a considerable amount about attention to television. Many programs, such as Sesame Street and Blue's Clues, have made use of this knowledge (Anderson, 2004). The second step is to ensure that the production is comprehensible and does not distract from the core educational content of the program. In this regard, productions benefit enormously from formative research done with storybooks based on scripts, storyboards, and animatics (usually black and white drawings and partial animation with audio from voice actors and stand-ins). Such formative research ensures that children can comprehend and remember the content. Systematic formative research was an aspect of Sesame Street's innovation (Lesser, 1974) and is currently employed in many successful educational children's programs.

The third step is transfer. Transfer occurs when information obtained in one context can be successfully applied in other contexts. Successful transfer has been found for programs such as Sesame Street that concentrate on cognitive skills (e.g., Ball & Bogatz, 1970), Square One TV (Hall et al., 1990), and Blue's Clues (Crawley et al., 1999), among others, in teaching school-readiness skills such as literacy, numeracy, and a variety of problem-solving skills for preschool and school-age children (Fisch, Kirkorian, & Anderson, 2005).

So how can transfer be encouraged? One theory, Fisch's capacity model (2000), attempts to combine literature-spanning information processing, cognitive schemas, and other mechanisms to account for transfer of learning from television. The model asserts that transfer relies on an initial comprehension of the educational content, the creation of a mental representation that is significantly more abstract than the initial learned content, and its relationship to the novel problem to which it will be applied. Breakdowns at any level of this process can result in a failure of transfer. An example of a way to increase transfer is to show the concept in operation in multiple contexts; this helps the viewers develop an abstract idea of the concept that is not tied to a specific concrete context (Fisch et al., 2005).

Final Comment

Television is but one platform for educational screen media. It is undoubtedly the most important medium for informal learning by preschool children, but it becomes supplemented and to some extent supplanted by other media as children get older. For this reason, an important feature in educational television program design is to include, as part of the overall plan, interactive media such as Internet resources and activities, DVDs and computer games, as well as books, magazines, and board games. If children become engaged with TV characters, they want to see those characters on websites, in books, in computer games, and elsewhere. When they learn ideas, skills, and concepts, they like to encounter them elsewhere. Consequently, any educational production focused on television must ultimately become a project incorporating many media.

There has been little research, however, on the effectiveness of multiplatform educational programming. A recent exception is a summative research report on the mathematics program Cyberchase by Fisch and colleagues (Fisch, Lesh, Motoki, Crespo, & Melfi, 2010). They found that, compared to children who only watched the TV show, children who also used the program's website and interactive DVDs showed better transfer of skills to new problems. This finding is consistent with transfer of learning theory and is probably due to increased exposure to problems in more varied contexts, and also to practicing of skills learned while watching the TV program. Video exposure alone, of course, does not readily encourage children to engage in practicing newly learned skills, whereas well-designed interactive media do. The success of informal educational media in general is likely to be enhanced by the use of multiplatform designs.

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FURTHER READING

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