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Cognitive Development and Television ComprehensionUniversity of Hariford The objective of this study was to determine whether several key concepts related to child development could be extended to existing theory and research concerning the comprehension of television by kindergartners and early primary school children. Much of the current research in the effects tradition has concentrated on the role of television in eliciting aggressive behavior. A neglected area is the function of television as a teacher of such things as appropriate social behavior, the ways by which characters resolve problems and the motives of individuals. During a one-year period several groups of young children were observed to determine how information from television programs was incorporated into their play, and to what extent developmental predictors such as role-taking, narrative recall, and liking for programs mediated the process of learning. For a more rigorous investigation, ninety children of three grade levels were given several cognitive developmental tasks to assess the specific instances of problem resolutions and motive content extracted from a popular television program. Results indicate that role-taking and program-liking are significant predictors of program comprehension, but narrative recall is not. Overall analysis of results suggests that individual differences among children partially explain the amount and kind of social learning from the medium, while chronological age is the most accurate index of content-learning.
Communication Research, Vol. 5, No. 2,
202-220 (1978) This article has been cited by other articles:
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