Multimedia and Literacy Development

Improving Achievement for Young Learners

Adriana G. Bus, Susan B. Neuman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781135859893
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Representing the state of the art in multimedia applications and their promise for enhancing early literacy development, this volume broadens the field of reading research by looking beyond print-only experiences to young readers' encounters with multimedia stories on the Internet and DVD. Multimedia storybooks include, in addition to static pictures and written text, features such as oral text, animations, sounds, zooms, and scaffolds designed to help convey meaning. These features are changing how young children read text, and also provide technology-based scaffolds for helping struggling readers.

Multimedia and Literacy Development reports experimental research and practices with multimedia stories indicating that new dimensions of media contribute to young children's ability to understand stories and to read texts independently. This is the first synthesis of evidence-based research in this field. Four key themes are highlighted:

• Understanding the multimedia environment for learning
• Designing multimedia applications for learning
• New approaches to storybook reading
• Multimedia applications in classroom instruction.

Written in jargon-free language for an international audience of students in university courses on literacy and information technology, researchers, policymakers, program developers, and media specialists, this volume is essential reading for all professionals interested in early literacy and early interventions.

I
Understanding the Multimedia Environment for Learning

1
Special Audience, Special Concerns

Children and the Media

Ellen Wartella and Rebekah A. Richert

The number and type of media platforms have expanded over the past 50 years from the traditional media of television, radio, movies, newspapers, books, and magazines to include other interactive digital media. Interactive media have come of age; and interactive entertainment products intended to be used by children within and out of school settings is growing: CD-ROMs, computers, the Internet, video games (for a variety of handheld and console platforms), interactive toys (including educational talking books), and a variety of wireless software for cell phones and other wireless devices. In short, for today’s children, interactive media have become part of the media landscape in which they are growing up. These devices represent the most recent in a century-long introduction of media technologies into the lives of children.

This chapter reviews the American context of what we know about young children and their introduction to media, as well as what young children learn from television and its impact on their development. Most importantly, concerns about young children’s use of media are rooted in an understanding that children represent a special audience with special needs.

Media Use and Access

The extent to which American children are growing up with all kinds of media available in their home is striking. From print media through screen media (television, computers) to portable technologies (PDAs and iPods), American children increasingly live in homes that enable them to have media as part of their lives during nearly all of their waking hours. According to a 2005 Kaiser Family Foundation study of a national sample of 2,000 third through twelfth graders, American children live in homes with unprecedented access to media (Roberts, Foehr, & Rideout, 2005). The typical 8- to 18-year-old lives in a home with:

• 3.5 televisions

• 3.3 radios

• 2.9 VCRs/DVD players

• 1.5 computers

• 68% have televisions and 49% have video game players in their bedrooms

• 31% have computers and 20% have Internet access in their bedrooms.

In 2003 and 2006, the Kaiser Family Foundation funded nationally representative surveys of parents of 0- to 6-year-olds, a commonly overlooked population among media researchers (Rideout & Hamel, 2006; Rideout, Vandewater, & Wartella, 2003). These studies demonstrated that in recent years, there has been a proliferation of media for children under 2: from Baby Einstein videos to entire cable channels directed at babies (e.g., Baby First). Children are starting to use screen media at very young ages, both as babies sitting on their parents’ laps and as toddlers watching television and videos.

Moreover, American parents have positive attitudes about these media. According to a separate analysis of the Kaiser Family Foundation data by Vandewater et al. (2007), 70% of parents of children under 2 do not follow the 1999 American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP) guidelines recommending that no child under 2 should watch screen media. Furthermore, the AAP recommended that older children be limited to two hours a day of screen media. According to parents’ reports, 56% of 3- and 4-year-olds watch two hours or less on a typical day; and 70% of 5- and 6-year-olds watch more than two hours of screen media on a typical day (Vandewater et al. 2007).

The parents of young children do not always follow the AAP guidelines. One explanation may be that American parents generally feel positively about television created for children. According to Rideout et al. (2003), 40% of mothers of young children believed that television mostly helped children’s learning. The mothers were pleased they could make use of the proliferation of educational media for preschool children.

In the past 15 years, the U.S. media landscape has grown from two national television cable networks devoted to children to more than a dozen today; and many of these networks claim to be educational for children. For example, on the U.S. public broadcasting network alone, there were five educational preschool shows aired in the 1990 to 1994 period; whereas in 2006, there were 20 educational shows for children. Add to these numbers the considerable programming on networks (many of which are international in distribution), such as Nickelodeon, Disney, and Cartoon Network, and it becomes clear that there is a plethora of children’s programming available to American children.

It is not too surprising, given this context, that young children are spending a large amount of time with screen media. Television watching is a dominant activity of childhood in America today. In 2006, 48% of 0- to 6-year-olds had used a computer and 30% had played video games (Rideout, 2006). A surprising 20% of children between birth and age 2 had television sets in their bedrooms. According to parents, these children spend about 2 hours a day with screen media, which is equivalent to the amount of time parents reported their children spent playing. Although parents rated watching television as the most important of the screen media for these very young children, children also spent time with videos and DVDs (one hour and 18 minutes per day), playing video games (55 minutes per day), and using a computer (50 minutes per day) (Rideout, 2006).

Attention to screen media (television, computers, and videos or DVDs) is a major daily activity of the vast majority of American children under the age of 6. According to Rideout (2006), 83% of American children in this age range use screen media each day. Moreover, even among the youngest children, 61% of those from 6 months to 1 year of age attend to screen media on a typical day. A total of 90% of children aged 2 to 6 are reported to attend to screen media daily. It is clear that screen media are now an important part of American children’s introduction to media.

Fifty years ago, children’s first medium was print; and although print media use is still a part of American children’s typical day, it is giving way to screen media use. For instance, according to Rideout (2006), comparable percentages of American children under 6 are reading or being read to on a typical day (83%), and slightly higher numbers of babies from 6 months to 1 year are more read to (77%) than involved in screen media. However, fewer older (2- to 6-year-olds) children read or are read to than watch screen media (81% of 2- and 3-year-olds and 87% of 4- and 6-year-olds). Screen media are dominating young children’s media use, and it appears that early introduction to screen media is occurring either before or simultaneously with introduction to print media.

We are now raising a generation of children who are introduced to screen media at the same time they are introduced to print media. This phenomenon is different from earlier generations of children who typically were introduced to picture books and print media before watching television or other screens. The effect that this increased exposure to screen media may have on development is unclear.

A Special Audience

The media audience of young children, particularly children ages 0 to 6, has a unique set of issues related to media exposure and learning from media, especially screen media. Some of these issues are very practical and basic; others involve the development of more sophisticated cognitive abilities. In particular, we focus on young children’s unique characteristics in relation to perception, language, imitation, symbolic representation, and analogical reasoning.

In terms of infant perception, infants do not have adult-like eye coordination until 6 months (Aslin & Jackson, 1979); and visual acuity is very poor at birth, improving over the first year of life (Kellman & Banks, 1998). Infants’ auditory perception is much more developed at birth. In fact, newborn infants have the unique ability to discriminate all phonemes in all languages, regardless of the language being spoken around them (Werker, Gilbert, Humphrey, & Tess, 1981). Infants typically begin to lose this ability between 6 and 8 months of age, becoming more adult-like in their discrimination in that they can only discriminate the phonemes that occur within their native tongue (Eilers, Gavin, & Wilson, 1979). Research has demonstrated that repeated exposure to a non-native language through a book-reading interaction increases the length of time for which infants can continue to distinguish particular non-native phonemes. Interestingly, this effect was only demonstrated if the infants heard the non-native language in a live interaction, but not when the exposure was through a DVD (Kuhl, Tsao, & Liu, 2003).

It is also important to consider children’s language development in relation to their learning from screen media. On average, children begin to speak their first words around 10 to 12 months of age, and the rate at which they learn new words increases substantially between 22 and 37 months of age (Benedict, 1979). This phase is often called the word spurt. Children’s receptive vocabulary (i.e., the words they can understand but do not say) generally develops earlier than their productive vocabulary (i.e., the words they say) (Schafer & Plunkett, 1998). In considering how children learn new words, a large body of research suggests that infants are more likely to learn words for novel objects if a speaker is looking at an object rather than attending elsewhere (e.g., Baldwin, 1993). In fact, it has been argued that infants initially understand words as referent actions similar to gaze and pointing (e.g., Woodward, 2004). Given these factors in how children learn words, we might hypothesize that young children would not initially learn words from television until they are well into the word spurt phase of language development. Recent findings from research in our lab suggests that even after as many as 15 exposures to a video meant to teach infants words, 12- to 15-month-olds demonstrated no learning of these words (Robb, Richert, & Wartella, 2006).

Another aspect related to children’s cognitive development as well as their learning from screen media where children can see a model has to do with children’s ability to imitate, in particular the development of deferred imitation (i.e., imitation after a delay). Early research on imitation suggests that even neonates will imitate a live model’s facial expressions (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977). However, deferred imitation is most often used as the indicator of children’s learning through imitating others. In some cases, infants as young as 9 months have demonstrated memory and reproduction of event sequences up to 1 month after seeing the sequence for the first time (e.g., Barr & Hayne, 2000).

Some research has directly explored young children’s ability to imitate live versus videotaped models (e.g., Barr & Hayne, 1999; Hayne, Herbert, & Simcock, 2003; Meltzoff, 1988). Typically in this procedure, children are shown various actions that can be done to a puppet or a machine. Some studies have found that 14- and 24-month-olds will imitate specific toy manipulations both immediately after viewing the video and 24 hours later (Meltzoff, 1988). Other researchers have found that 12- to 15-month-olds imitated the live demonstrations even after a 24-hour delay, but they were poor at imitating the televised demonstrations (Barr & Hayne, 1999). A separate study revealed that this deficit in learning from the videotaped models persisted until 30 months of age (Hayne et al., 2003); and further research has indicated that children in this age range need as many as six repetitions of the procedure before imitating from televised demonstrations (Muentener, Price, Garcia, & Barr, 2004).

Findings on children’s development of symbolic representation can also inform our understanding of the child audience. Research on children’s dual representation difficulties has indicated that children often cannot recognize that something that is very interesting in and of itself can be a source of information for an analogous, real world situation (e.g., DeLoache, 1995). In these studies, after children have been shown a toy Snoopy doll hidden in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Understanding the Multimedia Environment for Learning
• Part II Designing Multimedia Applications for Learning
• Part III New Approaches to Storybook Reading
• Part IV Multimedia Applications in Classroom Instruction
• List of Contributors
• Index