Educator Endorsements
More Than Once
| Facts About Children |
| Download this amazing study by Doctor Anna Hynd called "Evaluating four and five-year old children's responses to interactive television programs."
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That is how children learn…through repetition – experiencing the same content over and over again which is not a chore when the source is both informative as well as stimulating entertainment.
The quality of the repetition is of real importance, as there is a concern that errors may be imprinted on young memories.
On Repetition: One reason why media can be such a powerful educational tool is that content can be easily and cheaply repeated. Literal repetition of episodes can enhance comprehension and subsequent learning. We have already noted the experimental study comparing preschoolers who watched one episode of Blue's Clues with those who watched the same episode once a day on five consecutive days. In that study, attention to the episode remained high and relatively constant over the course of five presentations while comprehension for program content increased with repeated exposure to the episode. Children also increasingly interacted with the content (in terms of audience participation) as the episode was repeated.71 Similar benefits of literal repetition have been reported in other studies.72 Moreover, the Blue's Clues experiment found that transfer of learning from the specific examples presented in the program to different problems with similar solutions increased as a function of program repetition.
The Future of Children: A Collaboration of The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and The Brookings Institution.Children and Electronic Media: Media and Young Children's Learning
Two studies examined the effects of repeated viewing on children's comprehension of videos. In Study 1, 72 children aged 6-8 watched The Sword in the Stone. Afterwards, children who had seen the film before were compared with those for whom the film was novel.
In Study 2, 291 children aged 4-8, watched one of two versions of a short story in which the main character's appearance was incongruous with her behavior. Children were tested after one or four exposures. Results of both studies indicated that repetition reduced initial developmental differences in comprehension and helped younger children inhibit the perceptual salience of characters' appearance. However, children's understanding of the more complex causal sequences and the moral of the film in Study1 remained low, despite prior exposure.
Marie-Louise Mares - Marie-Louise Mares, Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison
After repeated exposure to a second vignette, children and adults remembered more educational material verbatim, and boys were better able to sequence important visual material, but participants still did not recognize significant verbal program content. The results suggest that songs improve verbatim memory, but spoken presentations improve verbal comprehension of content.
Media Psychology - Sandra L.Calvert - Department of Psychology, Georgetown University.
