The Impact of TV Character-Initiated Interactions on Children’s Attention and Comprehension

Framework

The cognitive theory of multimedia learning by Mayer (2001)
Capacity model by Fisch (2000)
Principles for generative processing by Mayer (2021)

Methods

We adopted a between-subjects design in which participants were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions: a story-relevant condition in which children watch an episode of an educational TV program with TV character-initiated interactions targeting the main story (e.g. “We need to find clues to solve the problem, will you help? ”; “Where is the clue?”), and a knowledge-relevant condition in which children watch an episode with character-initiated interactions focusing on the content knowledge (e.g. “What’s the opposite of smallest?”).
Participants were 12 American and Chinese children aged from 38 months to 67 months (M = 56.42 months, SD = 9.51 months). There were two test sessions for each treatment condition. After collecting informed consent from one parent, the parent was interviewed about the child’s demographic characteristics. During the first session, participants completed three assessments about program familiarity, prior knowledge of content knowledge, and prior knowledge of the central story in the first session. They also watched a 5-minute clip of the chosen show. The second session took place about 5 to 7 days after the first session. Participants watched the episode and completed the posttest comprehension assessment of the content knowledge and the central story. To assess children’s performance in a more naturalistic viewing environment, all of the sessions were conducted in children’s homes remotely via Zoom. In the second test session, participants watched the episode on a computer in a quiet room with an adult sitting either beside or behind them. Participants were videotaped by the computer camera during viewing. Parents were asked to record their children during TV viewing using the camera on their phones. The videotapes were used for coding visual attention, verbal responses, and nonverbal engagement.
This is a pilot study, so we will report the exploratory results with the central trends of the quantitative data from the comprehension measures. We will also report the qualitative data from open-ended interview questions. Finally, we will code and report the duration of children's visual attention, the frequency of verbal responses, and the frequency of nonverbal engagement under different conditions.

Results

The results are not complete because we are still cleaning the data. But we expected to see a) children in the knowledge-relevant condition comprehend the content knowledge better than the central story while children in the story-relevant condition will comprehend the central story better than the content knowledge; b) children in the knowledge-relevant condition comprehend the content knowledge better than those in the story-relevant condition, but they will comprehend less of the main story than their peers in the story-relevant condition; c) children in the knowledge-relevant condition pay more attention to the content knowledge while children in the story-relevant condition will focus more on the central story.

Importance

Given that educational TV and videos still predominate children’s daily screen time (Rideout & Robb, 2020) today, a clear understanding of how TV character-initiated interactions benefit children can help both TV program producers and educators improve the design of their educational TV shows and videos. Addressing this issue from a cognitive and developmental perspective also provides implications for future studies to explore the relationships among cognitive apprenticeship, attention, and multimedia learning in children. In particular, the interactive technique may provide scaffolding at the meta-level by teaching children to make decisions about what to focus on when they are watching educational TV or videos.

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