WEEK 3 – Development meets Media (part 2): tweens and teens
Plugged In – Chapter 11: Educational Media
Valkenburg, P. M., & Piotrowski, J. T. (2017). Plugged in: How media attract and affect youth. Yale University Press.
Thus far, this book has highlighted the darker side of media use, such as the effects of media
violence on aggression or the effect of sexual media content on sexual behavior. In this
chapter, the authors turn to its sunny side, focusing on the positive effects of educational
media – that is, media designed to support youth’s development.
Where it all began
Educational media, particularly educational television, secured its place in history with the
arrival of Sesame Street in 1969:
* The shows was developed to help prepare preschool children (ages 2–5) for
elementary school, particularly children from low-income and minority backgrounds
* What distinguished Sesame Street was its use of empirical research as an integral
part of the production process In its design, Sesame Street relied (and continues
to rely) on the input of in-house experts on child development, learning, and media
* It has become an exemplar of how to incorporate academic insight into educational
programming
* It’s both entertaining and research driven
* The core aim of Sesame Street has been to foster the school-readiness skills of
preschool children School-readiness skills encompass some of the following:
A. Academic learning – e.g., letter and number recognition
B. Social-emotional learning – e.g., friendliness, cooperation, and acceptance of
diversity
* Because vidence began to appear that academic success was a function not only of
academic skills, but also of healthy social-emotional development in the 1990s, the
curriculum of Sesame Street underwent a structural shift in the direction of social-
emotional learning
* This trend toward a more encompassing definition of learning could be seen in
educational media legislation at the time For example, in the US, the 1996
guidelines of the Children’s Television Act introduced the so-called 3-hour rule
requiring that public broadcast stations air, at a minimum, 3 hours a week of
children’s educational or informational television To be considered educational or
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, informational, programs could meet children’s cognitive-intellectual or social-
emotional needs.4
Educational media use at home
In the new millennium, educational media have become a fixture in children’s media diets.
American children ages 2–10 now spend about an hour a day with educational media,
with comparable estimates in other industrialized countries. Whereas two decades ago,
children began to watch television at around two and a half years of age, today’s children
start watching at around four months What might explain this acceleration in
(educational) media use in early childhood?
1. Increased marketing efforts directed toward the youngest age group
Commercial conglomerates have set their sights on the “diaper demographic”
E.g., shortly after Teletubbies, Baby Einstein products (videos, toys, etc.) were
introduced to the public and soon became a multimillion-dollar business,
which was sold to Disney in 2001
Most recently, targeted educational apps have appeared on the market
Apple’s educational app store, for example, currently featuring more than
eighty thousand apps to choose from
In many Western countries, policies have also started to put more emphasis on so-called
informal learning in early childhood – that is, the kind of learning that occurs spontaneously
and playfully outside school.
Although educational media are now a common part of early childhood, the use of such
media seems to decrease as children grow older
* Whereas 2- to 4-year-olds spend slightly more than 1 hour a day using educational
media, 8- to 10-year-olds are estimated to spend only 42 minutes a day with
* Also, the percentage of educational media content in overall media use drops
significantly with age: for 2- to 4-year-olds, it is 78%, whereas for 8- to 10-year-olds,
it is 27% This drop-off in educational media use among older children is not yet
clearly understood, it may though be because:
A. As children enter formal schooling, they have less discretionary time for
educational media use because of homework and extracurricular activities
B. Fewer successful educational media options are available for older children
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, C. They have declining interest in such content Often referred to as the
“spinach syndrome,” this term refers to what happens to children by about five
years of age, as they begin to reject anything that is supposed to be good for
them
Learning from educational media
Public concerns about the negative effects of media on children are of long standing. Implicit
in these concerns is the notion that children and teens can learn from media if we
subscribe to the notion that media content can teach youth negative lessons, it stands to
reason that it can teach positive lessons too.
The goals of educational media vary significantly, but most have attempted to support:
A. Youth’s academic skills
B. Social-emotional learning
C. Creativity
Although research on the positive effects of media is not as robust as that on their negative
effects, this growing field has thus far compellingly shown that under certain conditions,
educational media content can bolster both the academic and social-emotional development
of youth.
How do children and teens learn from television and other media? Several scholars have
attempted to explain educational media effects, most notably:
* Albert Bandura (social cognitive theory)
* Shalom Fisch (the capacity model)
* Katherine Buckley and Craig Anderson (the general learning model)
Each theory makes predictions about the conditions under which the skills, attitudes,
and behaviors portrayed in educational media will be replicated in and transferred to
other circumstances
Social Cognitive Theory
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, Social cognitive theory predicts that children are more likely to learn from a model in the
media if they are able to identify with the model or if they perceive the model to be similar to
themselves
* Children are more likely to adopt behavior from a model that is rewarded than from a
model that is punished
* By observing models, children learn to:
A. Imitate the rewarded behavior
B. To extract abstract behavioral rules that they can adapt in future situations –
that is, observational learning
For this kind of learning to occur, attention to the model and its behavior
is critical Attention can be:
1. Enhanced by specific characteristics of the model – Attractiveness,
popularity in the group, sense of humor
2. Predicted by differences between the children – Developmental
levels, prior experiences, preferences
The Capacity Model
Shalom Fisch developed his capacity model to explain how children extract and
comprehend educational content from narrative educational media. His model proposes
that educational media (particularly television) contain two forms of content:
1. Narrative – story line
2. Embedded educational content
Central to the model is the supposition that children’s working memory is limited, and that
the cognitive demands of the embedded educational content should not exceed the
resources available in working memory. When the educational content and the narrative:
A. Tangential to each other, the two parallel comprehension processes compete for
children’s limited resources in working memorym may result in impaired
comprehension of the educational content
B. When the educational content is integral to the narrative comprehension of the
educational content is expected to improve
The general learning model
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