Scientific News  Health care Other illnesses and advices TELEVISION CAN ENHANCE CHILDREN'S INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT, STUDY FINDS
TELEVISION CAN
ENHANCE CHILDREN'S INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT, STUDY FINDS
 Television is so commonly criticized as being bad
for children that an important fact sometimes gets overlooked: some types of
television viewing may actually enhance children's intellectual development,
according to a study.
"Sweeping condemnations of television ignore
the obvious fact that television contains an enormous variety of forms and
content," says lead study author Aletha C. Huston, Ph.D., of the Department
of Human Ecology at the University of Texas at Austin. "The findings of
this study provide strong support for the notion that the effects of television
viewing depend on program content and genre.”
In the study published in the September/October
issue of Child Development, Huston and colleagues analyzed the
television-viewing habits of nearly 200 children aged 2 to 7 over a three-year
period. The children, all from low- to moderate-income families, were also given
periodic tests of their reading, math, vocabulary and school-readiness skills.
The researchers focused on low- to
moderate-income families for several reasons: these families have been
underrepresented in previous research, they tend to watch TV frequently, and
many educational programs are targeted at them.
Very young children who spent a few hours a week
watching educational programs such as Sesame Street, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood,
Reading Rainbow, Captain Kangaroo, Mr. Wizard's World and 3-2-1 Contact had
higher academic test scores 3 years later than those who didn't watch
educational programs, the researchers found. Also, children who watched many
hours of entertainment programs and cartoons had lower test scores than those
who watched fewer hours of such programs.
Because the average child watched just 1 to 3
hours weekly of education programs, compared to an average of 10 to 16 hours of
general-audience programs, and 5 to 8 hours of cartoons, the researchers
couldn't test whether watching many hours of educational TV would also have
exerted a negative effect.
The positive effects of educational programming
were strongest for children aged 2 and 3. "Good educational programs can
provide lasting benefits to children at many ages, but it may be especially
important to provide such fare for very young children because they are less
likely than older children to be exposed to formal preschool instruction, and
because stable habits of viewing may be formed in the first few years of life,"
Huston says.
More research is needed on how television may
affect intellectual development, say the researchers, who offered several
suggestions. TV watching may reduce the time children have to spend engaging
verbally and socially with others. Also, while educational TV challenges
children with age-specific techniques designed to enhance learning,
general-audience programs they can't quite follow may have the opposite effect.
"A child with prolonged exposure to such content may have few experiences
of engaging successfully with the material and solving problems," Huston
says.
"Children are most likely to become actively
engaged with television content that is neither too easy nor too difficult to
comprehend, that is, content that provides some challenges, but also allows a
child to gain a sense of mastery," the researcher adds.
###
Contact:
Source of the given news and the copyrights
belong to a Center
for the Advancement of Health
Publishing date: October 3, 2001
Back
| 
