Television Literacy for Young Children

Abstract

Young children were able to learn the contents of television literacy curricula and to apply them in discussions about television reality, but such learning did not seem to mediate television's impact on social attitudes.Much of what children watch on television-both programs (11, 31, 32) and commercials (2, 7)-has not been produced with their welfare or their parents' values in mind. Research indicates that children's attitudes, behavior, and knowledge are influenced by this content (16, 17,30). But while there has been increasing consumer/viewer activism regarding television for children, there is little evidence that TV content will be altered in significant ways in the near future.Thus another approach has been undertaken to modify some of television's effect-to make children more critical evaluators of its content. The work reported here represents an effort to achieve this goal by (a) conducting research to determine what would constitute critical evaluation skills in young children uis-a-ois entertainment programming, (b) developing curricula to teach these skills, and (c) evaluating the extent to which children learned the content of the curricula, applied it to their reasoning about television programs, and used it to mediate between exposure to selected content and the effects of that content.When we began this project in 1974, we knew little about the audience factors that determine what kinds of content influence which viewers and to what extent. Some research, mostly dealing with adults, suggested that the effects of exposure to the information presented by a mass medium could be modified by the abilities to devalue the source of information, to assess the motivations for presenting any information, and to perceive the degree of reality intended (3,8, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20). The studies were few in number, focusing mostly on adults and looking at the impact of live speakers, live models, written communications, and filmed messages rather than of television. Thus we began our project by attempting to identify the information, attitudes, attentional processes, and reasoning processes which seemed to lead some viewers to a more critical evaluation of television content. This work, conducted over two years, involved about 100 black, Puerto Rican, and white adolescents and adults and more than 100 black and white elementary school children.This work, and that of others, guided our curriculum development into four potentially important areas, some of which are similar to those identified earlier with adults and some of which have shown up in work subsequent to ours. The first aim was to decrease the degree to which children perceived the programs they watch as real (4, 5, 22, 24). The second was to increase children's tendencies and abilities to compare television content with information from other sources (6, 10, 13, 23). The third goal was to diminish the credibility children ascribed to television through teaching about the industry's economic goals, about production, and about other legitimate sources o...

Is Body-to-Body Communication Still the Prototype?

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