Describe the positive and negative influences of technology on human development during childhood (ages 3-12) or adolescence (ages 13-18). Usin
Prior to beginning work on this discussion, read
- Chapter 7 and 8 in the textbook;
- the Influence of Young Children’s Use of Technology on Their Learning: A ReviewLinks to an external site.
- Media and Young Children’s LearningLinks to an external site..
For your initial post, you will describe the positive and negative influences of technology on human development during childhood (ages 3–12) or adolescence (ages 13–18).
Using the University of Arizona Global Campus Library, research at least one peer-reviewed article that describes the way(s) in which technology has either positively or negatively influenced physical, cognitive, or psychosocial development in childhood or adolescence (e.g., the effects of media violence on aggression or educational products on learning). In your discussion:
- Describe factors which may mediate the effect(s) of technology in your selected stage (e.g., education, gender, socioeconomic status, culture, or family and parenting).
- Evaluate the unique scholarly perspectives found in your research and interpret the implications of technology on human development.
- Support your perspective(s) with references from the required or peer-reviewed resources, making sure to properly cite each source.
- Additionally, conclude by considering relevant ethical concerns (perhaps regarding policy decisions).
Media and Young Children’s Learning
VOL. 18 / NO. 1 / SPRING 2008 39
Media and Young Children’s Learning
Heather L. Kirkorian, Ellen A. Wartella, and Daniel R. Anderson
Summary Electronic media, particularly television, have long been criticized for their potential impact on children. One area for concern is how early media exposure influences cognitive development and academic achievement. Heather Kirkorian, Ellen Wartella, and Daniel Anderson summa- rize the relevant research and provide suggestions for maximizing the positive effects of media and minimizing the negative effects.
One focus of the authors is the seemingly unique effect of television on children under age two. Although research clearly demonstrates that well-designed, age-appropriate, educational televi- sion can be beneficial to children of preschool age, studies on infants and toddlers suggest that these young children may better understand and learn from real-life experiences than they do from video. Moreover, some research suggests that exposure to television during the first few years of life may be associated with poorer cognitive development.
With respect to children over two, the authors emphasize the importance of content in mediat- ing the effect of television on cognitive skills and academic achievement. Early exposure to age- appropriate programs designed around an educational curriculum is associated with cognitive and academic enhancement, whereas exposure to pure entertainment, and violent content in particular, is associated with poorer cognitive development and lower academic achievement.
The authors point out that producers and parents can take steps to maximize the positive effects of media and minimize the negative effects. They note that research on children’s television viewing can inform guidelines for producers of children’s media to enhance learning. Parents can select well-designed, age-appropriate programs and view the programs with their children to maximize the positive effects of educational media.
The authors’ aim is to inform policymakers, educators, parents, and others who work with young children about the impact of media, particularly television, on preschool children, and what society can do to maximize the benefits and minimize the costs.
www.futureofchildren.org
Heather Kirkorian is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. Ellen Wartella is a professor, executive vice chancellor, and provost at the University of California–Riverside. Daniel Anderson is a professor at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst.
Heather L. Kirkorian, Ellen A. Wartella, and Daniel R. Anderson
40 THE FUTURE OF CHILDREN
Since television first appeared in the nation’s living rooms in the middle of the twentieth century, observers have voiced recurrent concern over its impact on view-
ers, particularly children. In recent years, this concern has extended to other electronic screen media, including computers and video game consoles. Although researchers still have much to learn, they have provided information on the links between electronic media, especially television, and children’s learning and cognitive skills. The message is clear: most (if not all) media effects must be considered in light of media content. With respect to development, what children watch is at least as important as, and probably more important than, how much they watch.
In this article we review media research with an emphasis on cognitive skills and academic achievement in young children. We begin by arguing that by age three, children are active media users. We then discuss important aspects of child development that highlight the debate over whether children younger than two should be exposed to electronic media, emphasizing the apparent video deficit of infants and toddlers in which they learn better from real-life experiences than they do from video. Next we look at research on media effects in three areas: associations between media use and cognitive skills, particularly attention; experimental evidence for direct learning from educational media;
and associations between early media use and subsequent academic achievement. We close with some suggestions for both media producers and parents for enhancing and extending the potentially beneficial effects of electronic media use in children, particularly those who are of preschool age.
Children as Active Media Users Until the 1980s, social science researchers had only an implicit theory of how viewers watched television. Analysts regarded televi- sion viewing, particularly by young children, as being cognitively passive and under the control of salient attention-eliciting features of the medium such as fast movement and sound effects. Jerome Singer formalized this theory, proposing that the “busyness” of television leads to a sensory bombardment that produces a series of orienting responses that interferes with cognition and reflection. As a result, children cannot process television content and therefore cannot learn from it.1 Others proposed similar views, arguing that programs such as Sesame Street provided nothing that could be truly educational.2
Aletha Huston and John Wright proposed a somewhat different theory of attention to television, positing that the features of television that drive children’s attention may change as a child ages. Specifically, they claimed that in infancy, perceptually salient features of television such as movement and sound effects drive attention. With age and experience, however, children are less influ- enced by perceptual salience and are able to pay greater attention to informative features such as dialogue and narrative.3
Around the same time, Daniel Anderson and Elizabeth Lorch created a complementary model of children’s attention to television, drawing on evidence that television viewing is
Until the 1980s, social science researchers had only an implicit theory of how viewers watched television.
Media and Young Children’s Learning
VOL. 18 / NO. 1 / SPRING 2008 41
based on active cognition. They argued that attention in children at least as young as two is guided in large part by program content. For example, preschool children pay more attention to normal video clips than to those that have been edited to make them incom- prehensible, for example by using foreign dubs of the video clips or randomizing the order of shots within the clips.4 Moreover, preschool-age children pay more attention to children’s programs than to commercials even though commercials are more densely packed with formal features.5 Children learn strate- gies for watching television by using their knowledge of formal features to guide atten-
tion.6 Finally, to understand typical programs that use standard video montage such as cuts, pans, and zooms, children engage in a variety of inferential activities while viewing.7
Developmental Considerations Although children are active viewers of television by preschool age, research suggests that this may not be true of infants and tod- dlers. In this section we summarize research on attention to, comprehension of, and learn- ing from video by children under two.
Attention to Electronic Media Until recently, research on media effects
TV programs Description Network
Barney & Friends Evoking a preschool setting, Barney the dinosaur teaches songs and dances to young children. The show focuses heavily on pro-social themes of sharing, empathizing, helping others, and cooperating.
PBS
Blue’s Clues A human host encourages viewers at home to help solve a mystery with his dog friend, Blue. The show is often repetitive and encourages interactivity by asking viewers to find clues and solve puzzles.
Nickelodeon
Bob the Builder Bob the Builder and his construction crew face building, renovation, and repair chal- lenges. The series often focuses on identifying a problem and making a plan to solve the problem.
PBS
Dora the Explorer Featuring a bilingual Latina girl as the lead, Dora and her friends go on quests and help others, encouraging viewers to help out through their own actions or by telling her what she needs to know. In addition to highlighting traditional educational content such as color and shapes, Dora teaches language by repeating words and phrases in English and Spanish.
PBS
Sesame Street Combining puppetry, live action, and animation, this long-running series focuses on a wide range of topics including the alphabet, numbers, emotion management, conflict reso- lution, music, dance, and healthy lifestyles.
PBS
Teletubbies Centering on four colorful characters, the Teletubbies speak in a baby-like language and learn through play. The Teletubbies have televisions in their stomachs that show clips of real children from around the world. This program is targeted at toddlers.
PBS
Thomas & Friends Based on a book series, Thomas the Tank Engine and his engine friends learn to work hard and be cooperative with each other.
PBS
The Wiggles Featuring a four-man singing group for children, episodes of The Wiggles include songs and skits focused on solving a problem. The Wiggles encourages children to sing songs and move their bodies to music.
Disney
DVD series Description Producer
Baby Einstein Series content covers wide range of topics including music, art, language, poetry, and science. Targeted at children starting at one month.
Disney
Brainy Baby Educational series highlighting range of subjects including alphabet, art, music, shapes, foreign languages, and right and left brain development. Targeted at children starting at nine months.
Brainy Baby Company
Sesame Beginnings Features baby versions of the Muppets from Sesame Street. The focus is on encouraging interactions between child and caregivers. Targeted at children starting at six months.
Sesame Workshop
Table 1. Selected Popular Television Programs and DVD Series for Young Children
Heather L. Kirkorian, Ellen A. Wartella, and Daniel R. Anderson
42 THE FUTURE OF CHILDREN
did not focus on infants and toddlers. Early studies reported that children younger than two paid little attention to television, perhaps because little television was produced for them.8 The early 1990s, however, saw a virtual explosion in the production of television
programs and videos designed for infants and toddlers, and some research now suggests that infants and toddlers pay close attention to these videos.9 The increase in infant- directed media products has led to debate over whether infants and toddlers should be exposed to electronic media. (See table 1 for a description of some popular media products for young children.)
Although the underlying mechanisms driving attention to video appear to be the same in adults and infants as young as three months, some research has found differences in the ways in which younger and older viewers watch professionally produced video.10 For example, one study observed patterns of eye movements in one-year-olds, four-year-olds, and adults while they watched Sesame Street and found systematic differences between infants and older viewers. Infants’ visual fixa- tions, for example, were more variable and less sensitive to changes in content.11 In an- other experiment, children aged six, twelve, eighteen, and twenty-four months watched normal and distorted segments of Teletubbies, a program designed for viewers in this age
range.12 In one distorted video, shots were randomly ordered; in the other, utterances were reversed to produce backwards speech. The experiment found that although older children (eighteen and twenty-four months) looked for longer periods at the normal video segment than at the distorted segments, younger children (six and twelve months) did not appear to discriminate between the two. These findings suggest that children under eighteen months may not understand, and thus learn from, television in the same way as do older children. In particular, they may be inattentive to dialogue and may fail to inte- grate comprehension across successive shots in filmic montage.
Perception of Video One area of cognitive development influenc- ing children’s ability to learn from television is the perception of video itself. Some research suggests that children do not begin to discrim- inate between television and real-life events until the early preschool years. For example, Leona Jaglom and Howard Gardner reported qualitative observations of three children from age two to five. They noted that at age two, the children recognized that the television world was contained within the television set but not until they reached age three or four did they realize that the television world could not affect them—that, for example, television characters could not enter their bedrooms. The authors concluded that sometime be- tween ages two and three, children develop an understanding of the representational nature of video.13
In a similar vein, John Flavell and several colleagues conducted a series of experiments with preschool-age children to investigate the distinction they made between real objects and those represented on video. Younger children were less likely to correctly answer
Research suggests that children do not comprehend the symbolic nature of television until they reach the preschool years.
Media and Young Children’s Learning
VOL. 18 / NO. 1 / SPRING 2008 43
questions regarding the uses of objects on television. For example, three- and four-year- old children saw a video image of a bowl of popcorn and were asked if the popcorn would fall out of the bowl when the television set was turned upside down. The four-year-olds recognized that televised images represent real objects while three-year-olds failed to discriminate between televised images and real objects, claiming that the popcorn would fall out of the bowl if the television was turned upside down.14
Other research focusing on children’s ability to discriminate between televised programs and commercials has generally demonstrated that children younger than five cannot con- sistently make that distinction.15 Even when young children correctly label programs and commercials, they may still think that the commercial is part of or connected to the program.16 Moreover, although children may be able to identify commercials based on perceptual cues by age five, their ability to recognize the persuasive intent and inherent bias in advertising does not appear to develop until age seven or eight.17
Together this research suggests that children do not comprehend the symbolic nature of television until they reach the preschool years; evidence of comprehending and learn- ing from television at younger ages than about two-and-a-half is meager. And it may take several more years before children are able to make more specific discriminations with respect to program content.
Learning from Electronic Media Many infant-directed media products make explicit claims about their educational value; others, with titles such as Baby Einstein, keep their claims implicit. But analysts know little about the extent to which children two
years and younger learn from commercially produced television programs. Experiments on learning from video have repeatedly found that infants and toddlers learn better from real-life experiences than from video. This so-called video deficit disappears by about age three, when learning from video becomes robust.18
Support for the video deficit hypothesis comes from several lines of research. Studies of language learning have demonstrated that children aged two and older can learn vocab- ulary from television.19 Unlike older children, however, infants and toddlers are less likely to learn from video. One experiment found that children younger than two learned vocabu- lary better from real-life experiences than from equivalent video presentations.20 Other experimental research demonstrates that television models are less effective than live ones in preserving discrimination of foreign phonemes (speech sounds) in infants.21
Additional support for the video deficit hypothesis comes from studies examining infants’ and toddlers’ ability to imitate specific actions, such as an adult demonstrating actions with a puppet. In an experiment comparing toddlers’ imitation of live and mediated (that is, videotaped) models, Rachel Barr and Harlene Hayne reported that twelve-, fifteen-, and eighteen-month-olds were more likely to perform a behavior after viewing unmediated, live models than after viewing either the video model or no model. Only the oldest age group was more likely to perform the behavior after seeing the video model than the control group after seeing no modeled behavior.22 A more recent experiment made similar findings for children at twenty-four and thirty months.23 It is clear that, unlike infants and toddlers, preschool-age children can readily imitate behaviors seen on video.24
Heather L. Kirkorian, Ellen A. Wartella, and Daniel R. Anderson
44 THE FUTURE OF CHILDREN
Another line of research relevant to infants’ and toddlers’ ability to transfer from video to real-world problems involves object-retrieval tasks. In these experiments, the child either sees a toy hidden in an adjacent room through a window or watches the toy being hidden on television. In a study of children aged two and two-and-a-half, Georgine Troseth and Judy DeLoache reported that both age groups were able to find the toy on every trial when the hiding event was seen through a window but less often when the event was watched on television, particularly for the younger participants.25 Kelly Schmitt and Daniel An- derson reported similar findings with overall performance at chance levels (25 percent) for children aged two and about 50 percent for children aged two-and-a-half in the television task but nearly perfect at both ages for the window task. Three-year-olds did well on both tasks.26 Marie Schmidt, Alisha Crawley-Davis, and Daniel Anderson attempted to minimize the influence of perceptual cues and simplify the task in two experiments. In the first, a sticker was hidden underneath a cutout on a felt-board that had the same dimensions as the television screen. In the second, an experimenter simply told the child, either live or on closed-circuit television, where the object was hidden. Performance of two-year- olds in both tasks was still at chance levels in the television conditions.27 Georgine Troseth and Judy DeLoache attributed this deficit to a poor understanding of symbolic representa- tions or to prior expectations about television as “unreal.” Recent work by Troseth shows that if toddlers have interactive experiences with television—if, for example, they con- verse with an experimenter via closed-circuit video—the video deficit in the object-retrieval task can be overcome.28
Overall, the bulk of the research supports a video deficit for learning by infants and
toddlers even though it can be overcome by an interactive relationship. Researchers have not yet demonstrated any learning, or lack of it, from commercial baby videos. One recent study evaluated the effect of a series of baby videos designed to foster parent-child interactions. Compared with parents who watched a comparison series (Baby Einstein), parents who watched videos from the Sesame Beginnings series showed more engaged interactions with their twelve- to twenty-one- month-old children if they had coviewed the videos at home on multiple occasions.29 Al- though there is as yet no evidence that babies learn anything from baby videos, apparently coviewing parents can.
To our knowledge no research has yet exam- ined computer and interactive game use in infants and toddlers, although these products are now being developed for children as young as six months of age and some parents report that their infants and toddlers use these media regularly. Based on a recent sur- vey of parents, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that 61 percent of children under age two use screen media (television, videos, DVDs) on a typical day and 43 percent of infants and toddlers watch television every day.30 Given a relative dearth of empirical re- search on infants and toddlers and a dispute over whether they even comprehend screen media, for the remainder of this article we will focus on educational media designed for preschoolers and older children. Research is urgently needed, however, to determine how media influence infants and toddlers.
Media Effects on Attention and Other Cognitive Skills Among their other charges, critics have often accused television of being a negative influence on the development of children’s cognitive skills. Much of the debate about the
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effect of television on cognition concerns the development of attention. The most common hypothesis has been that frequent changes in scenes and content disrupt young children’s ability to sustain attention.31 One reanalysis of longitudinal data collected during the 1980s found a small correlation between early television exposure at ages one and three years and subsequent symptoms of attention problems at age seven.32 Findings from stud- ies since then have been mixed.33
One possible mediating factor in the link be- tween early television viewing and attention skills is program content. Most correlational studies do not measure the types of programs to which children are exposed, making it impossible to draw any conclusions regarding content effects. However, a recent corre- lational study suggested that content is an important mediator of the relation between exposure to television before age three and subsequent attentional problems. Specifically, early exposure to violent and non-educational entertainment programming was positively associated with later symptoms of attention deficit but exposure to educational television was not related to attentional problems.34
One early study of the effects of television on behavior in preschoolers experimentally varied the type of content children viewed. The study compared preschoolers who were exposed to prosocial programs (Mister Rog- ers’ Neighborhood), neutral films, and violent cartoons (Batman, Superman).35 Children were observed first for a baseline period of three weeks, then for a four-week television viewing period, and finally for two weeks after the viewing period. Findings from this study suggest that the link between television viewing and children’s attentional skills is me- diated by content. Children who viewed the violent cartoons showed decreases in mea-
sures of self-regulation, whereas those who viewed the prosocial programs showed higher levels of task persistence, rule obedience, and tolerance of delay relative to baseline mea- sures and to children in the neutral viewing condition. It is important to note that the three categories of programs likely differed not only in content but with respect to formal features such as format (animation versus live-action) and pace. It is difficult within the context of this study to isolate the links be- tween content and self-regulatory skills, but the findings clearly indicate that television as a medium does not have an indiscriminate negative effect on attentional skills. In fact, several experiments have found that televi- sion can teach specific attention skills and strategies.36
Many allegations regarding the effect of television on children’s attention skills focus on the fast pace of programs such as Sesame Street.37 The only study to experimentally vary the pace of a television program ob- served preschoolers during tasks of perse- verance after the children either viewed an edited version of Sesame Street, composed of either particularly fast-paced segments or particularly slow-paced segments, or read books with parents. Analysts found no group differences in measures of distractibility or impulsiveness following either reading or
Educational television programs, those designed around a curriculum with a specific goal to communicate academic or social skills, teach their intended lessons.
Heather L. Kirkorian, Ellen A. Wartella, and Daniel R. Anderson
46 THE FUTURE OF CHILDREN
television viewing.38 This finding suggests that there is no immediate link between program pacing and attentional skills. Nonetheless, longitudinal research manipulating program content is needed to experimentally investi- gate the causal effect of television on atten- tion in preschoolers.
Discussions of computer use and video games have been more optimistic, with the relevant research seeming to support a link between both and cognition. The research generally focuses on cognitive skills other than atten- tion. One study, for instance, conducted an experiment with fifth graders to investigate the effects of video game experience on spatial skills in children. Subjects were randomly assigned to an experimental group that played a spatial game, such as navigating a marble along tracks through space, or a control group that played a computerized word game that was not spatial. Although the study found no between-group differences on pre-test measures of spatial skill, it found significantly higher post-test scores for the spatial video game group than for the control group.39 Similar results have been reported by others.40
Overall, the research suggests that electronic media might have an effect on attention skills. Television, especially when viewed by children younger than age two, may have a negative effect on attention development, though the evidence is relatively weak. Concern over television exposure before age two has been echoed in research on cognitive development more generally.41 Content appears to be an important mediator, and specific television content has been linked to attention skills. Studies of interactive media have found that video game play may enhance spatial cogni- tion, but research is lacking on other cognitive skills, particularly attention development.
Learning from Educational Media Educational television programs, those designed around a curriculum with a specific goal to communicate academic or social skills, teach their intended lessons. But because most research assessing the effectiveness of educational curricula is proprietary or not published in archival sources, most program evaluations go unseen by the general public. Nevertheless, reviews of this research demonstrate the effectiveness, both short- term and long-term, of curriculum-based
programming for children in areas as diverse as literacy, mathematics, science, and social skills.42 Academics have also published research evaluating the effectiveness of educational programs. We present examples of both correlational and experimental evaluative studies.
Blue’s Clues is a television program focusing on social and cognitive problem-solving skills in preschoolers. In a two-year program evaluation, Jennings Bryant and others followed preschoolers who were regular viewers of the show and preschoolers who were not because the program did not air in their town of residence. The two groups of children did not differ on measures of prob- lem solving and flexible thinking at the start of the study. At the end of the two-year observa- tion period, however, regular viewers of Blue’s Clues outperformed their non-viewing peers in many measures and were more successful and systematic in their problem solutions.
Preschoolers who view Sesame Street have higher levels of school readiness than those who do not.
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Solving the problems required careful planning, a trait frequently modeled and described in the program.43 In an experimen- tal study, preschool-age children were ran- domly assigned to watch one episode of Blue’s Clues, or the same episode five times, or one episode of a different program. Not surpris- ingly, children who viewed the Blue’s Clues program showed better comprehension of the specific information presented in the show, and children who watched the program five times showed better comprehension than those who saw it only once. Moreover, Blue’s Clues viewers scored higher than non-viewers on problem-solving tasks different from those directly presented in the program, particularly when they viewed the program repeatedly.44 Together these studies demonstrate immedi- ate and potentially long-lasting effects of Blue’s Clues on problem-solving skills, especially for regular viewers of the program.
Some television programs designed for young children focus on a variety of academic and social skills to help prepare children for entering school. One such program is Sesame Street, which has been by far the most studied children’s program, probably because of Sesame Workshop’s commitment to research, the program’s longevity and popularity, and its long history of both criticism and praise. Correlational research demonstrates a positive association between early exposure to Sesame Street and school readiness.45 That is, after an- alysts statistically control for a range of other factors known to affect school readiness, they find that preschoolers who view Sesame Stre
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