While working on my annotated bibliographies I thought of a good angle on my topic. Initially I wanted to stay away from content, but now I'm thinking that there's more to content than I initially thought. First I was most interested in the idea that the actual act of TV watching is detrimental to early childhood development, but the only support I could find for this position was not backed up by research. A lot of people feel this way but as far as I can tell it hasn't been proven.
So, then I thought about looking into a specific developmental theory (Piaget's on stages of intellectual development) and applying it to television. While I still may be able to do something with this, I'm finding it difficult to find relevant sources without sifting through tons of stuff.
Recently my research led me to differences in perception by age, gender, class, etc... and how that relates to differences in understanding of material presented through TV. One of the more interesting facts I found is that information presented very quickly in short snippets is much more entertaining than information presented coherently and at a slower rate. On the other hand, slow coherent presentations of information lead to much higher rates of absorption and retention of material than the faster, more entertaining version. It occurs to me that this leads to a conflict of interests for providers of television content; Is their goal to entertain or to educate? The content and presentation of the program should be very different based on the goal here. My instinct tells me that no matter how interested programming companies are in educating our youth, they are not interested enough to potentially lose money in the process. But in order to focus on education the shows would need to be made less interesting, less appealing to the audience. I think that the absence today of shows like Mr. Roger's Neighborhood and the prevalence of faster paced shows like Sesame Street or ... whatever else kids are watching these days (Cayden doesn't watch TV... so I don't know :-) backs up my instinctual feeling that education is low on the list of priorities for programmers of children's video material. If that's the case than content is a huge factor. If the content is universally contradictory to what is best for children at any given developmental stage then regardless of the content, it is bad for the child... right? Then maybe I can make an argument that the act of television watching is inherently bad for the child.
Thanks for your comment on my last post. Are you doing your dissertation on educating through video games? This idea would apply to that in the same way... in order to fully allow for optimal learning, the material would need to be presenting slowly and coherently. But that would make for a boring game to play! So if it's not optimal for learning than are children wasting time playing when they could be learning it more productively somewhere else?
Since I got into this topic late, I'm a feeling a little behind in developing a concrete topic and sticking with it, but at least I'm moving forward. The annotated biblio assignment is helping. So, what do you think about my progress and do you think this is a good tree to climb?
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The tv production is a direction on its own, public broadcasting companies are obligated to do certain amount of education programming. It's usually ratings first, education second. You could frame it toward educational qualities or lack of, of public education programming if that interests you.
The other thing is that learning and education is not necessarily the same thing. We learn regardless of whether the object learned can be deemed educational or not.
I'm not well versed on child development, but mimicry based on their surroundings seems to be a common way for toddlers to learn new things. They make pickup things based on people around them, or in case of tv, based on their interpretation of the moving images etc.
How activity x can be bad, or good, is not the best spot to focus on. What's the determining metric of good or bad? There's also the difference between short and long term measures. Much of this area would fall under the research of media effects and some developmental psych.
for the most part, best advice is to do some skim-reading of materials on the subject, see where that takes you. It's not really too late, things move really fast when you get to a focus.
yea it's one of the components of my dissertation work.
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