Childrens Comprehension of Television Messages Essay -- Children Tele

Childrens Comprehension of Television Messages The literature surveyed so far regarding pip-squeakrens attention to television has relied on observation of visual attention by the child viewers. Measures of visual attention alone do not provide an indication of what aspects of the message children be extracting from the television screen. In order to acquire indications of this, researchers have relied on post-viewing measures of childrens recognition and recall of information from the program. This research pull up stakes be considered in this section on childrens understanding of television messages. Here the concern is not with what children are looking at and listening to, but what they remember from the TV and what meaning the TV content has for them. Much of the research which has adopted a cognitive developmental perspective on studies of children and television has examined childrens comprehension of television messages. The underlying assumption of these studie s is that children playact different cognitive abilities and social experiences to the TV-viewing situation and that these influence how children made smack of the messages. Younger children with more limited inference-making ability are more likely to focus on the consequences of actions rather than the motivations of the actors, and often are shown to construe the television plot of ground line quite differently from children and adults. The way in which children construe meaning from television cannot be directly inferred from cognitive development guess. Cognitive development theory may aid us in describing how children make sense of television, but we should examine childrens understanding of television directly. How, then, has cognitive development the... ...hat appropriate learning materials will be developed to teach children about the medium of television, both its programming and advertising content. Such materials should help children overcome their misunderstan dings of television messages. By improving the skills children bring to the viewing situation we may be able to moderate the impact television has on the child. NOTES The argument advanced here does not mean to imply, however, that children are as active when watching television as they are when engaged in athletics or doing other sorts of activities. Activity here is relative. Multidimensional leveling is a statistical technique that looks at how subjects ratings of a variety of variables group together that is, it seeks to determine underlying dimensions which describe the relationship among a set of variables for a given group of subjects.