The General Learning Model
Buckley and Anderson’s general learning model was developed to explain the effects of prosocial video games. It is in many ways comparable to the general aggression model discussed in chapter 7. According to Buckley and Anderson, many features of video games make them excellent teachers. For example, games easily attract attention; they are highly motivating; they allow people to actively participate instead of passively watch; they show all steps necessary to perform a specific behavior; and they allow repetitive practicing.
The general learning model posits that prosocial media, in which the characters (or players in games) help one another, can increase both short- and long-term prosocial behavior. This can occur via a cognitive route, in which the prosocial game content primes identical prosocial scripts or schemas. It can occur via an emotional route, too, for example, when players form emotional attachments to characters or avatars, which in turn improves their learning.18 As with social cognitive theory and the capacity model, there is evidence to support the predictive value of the general learning model.19
Educational Media and Academic Skills
Can children learn academic skills from educational media? Can they, for example, learn letters, numbers, and geometric forms? Can they learn how to classify objects, reason logically, and solve problems? Yes, they can, but whether that happens depends on the content, the child, and the social environment. It was pointed out in earlier chapters that media effects depend on a host of developmental, dispositional, and social factors. The same is true for the effects of educational media. One of the most important of these factors is children’s developmental level, particularly the (mis)-match between their developmental level and the difficulty of media content.
Infants and Toddlers
The question whether young children can benefit from academically enriching media content brings us to one of the hottest debates in the educational media landscape—whether children under the age of two can learn at all from media. In chapter 4, we came across the video deficit hypothesis, which reflects a compelling body of research showing that infants and toddlers learn less from video than from real-life experiences—a phenomenon that seems to dissipate at around age three. Although it is not entirely clear what accounts for the video deficit, scholars have suggested that very young children are not able to transfer information portrayed in a two-dimensional space to a three-dimensional space. In addition, they have suggested that audiovisual media may not properly direct young children’s attention, since the video deficit seems to apply to young children’s interpretations of picture book illustrations as well as to television.20
There are two important provisions to the video deficit hypothesis. First, although infants and toddlers may learn less from a model in the media than from a real-life model, that difference does not mean they are not learning anything from the former. It just means that for very young children, real-life models are better teachers than mediated models. Second, although evidence for the video deficit is convincing, recent studies have demonstrated that the video deficit can be reduced or even neutralized—particularly in the context of literacy and mathematics education. For example, research has shown that repeated viewing of educational content can limit the video deficit.21 Similarly, the video deficit can be reduced when the child is familiar with a character in the program.22 And finally, new work with apps indicates that interactive features that draw children’s attention to the educational information promote learning.23
Equally interesting, the video deficit seems to disappear if an adult provides additional information to the child in order to help with learning. Such parental encouragement is known as parental mediation or, in Vygotskian terms, as scaffolding. Lev Vygotsky, a Russian developmental psychologist, made a distinction between the problems a child can solve by himself or herself (actual development) and problems she or he can solve with help from an adult (potential development). The space between what children can achieve alone and what they can achieve with the support of a competent other is known as the zone of proximal development. Through parental mediation of educational media content, adults can help children bridge this zone and, in the case of infants and toddlers, nullify the video deficit.24
Thus, while there is robust evidence to suggest that very young media users are better able to learn from real-life models than from media models, it is clear that both specific content characteristics and parental scaffolding can mitigate this video deficit. If these factors are taken into account, educational media can teach infants and toddlers literacy skills (such as language acquisition) and mathematical skills (such as seriation).
Preschoolers and Older Children
Although there are a handful of studies on the effects of educational media on academic skills among older children and teens, the majority of existing work has concentrated on early childhood. More than 1,000 studies have, for example, examined the influence of Sesame Street on young children’s early academic skills, and the vast majority have demonstrated its ability to support young children’s learning.25 In fact, in 2013, Marie-Louise Mares and Zhongdang Pan conducted a meta-analysis to identify the effectiveness of the international coproductions of Sesame Street. Working with data from more than ten thousand children across fifteen countries, their meta-analysis revealed significant positive effects of the program on literacy and numeracy, knowledge about health issues, and social reasoning.26
Sesame Street, however, is not the only program that has been shown to support early academic skills. Experimental research with Super Why!, an animated literacy-based American educational television show, found that children ages 3–6 who watched the program for eight weeks outperformed their nonviewing peers on nearly all literacy outcomes.27 Similarly, work with the American program Between the Lions found that children ages 6–8 who watched the program for four weeks had better word recognition and reading test scores than nonviewers.28 These effects were particularly pronounced among children moderately at risk for literacy deficits.
Similar benefits of educational television content on academic skills have been found for a host of other programs, including Barney and Friends, Dragon Tales, Blue’s Clues, and Pinky Dinky Doo. These programs were designed with the explicit intent to support academic skills, and they all relied on a combination of desk and field research to help ensure that the content met these goals.29 And impressively, watching such programs in early childhood has longer-term benefits: a longitudinal study by Daniel Anderson and colleagues revealed that adolescents who had watched many educational programs as preschoolers had higher grades in school, read more books, and placed more value on achievement than their nonviewing peers.30
The few studies on educational media effects among older children and teens have likewise found positive effects. For example, research on the American program Cyberchase, a show designed to support mathematical skills, revealed that among eight- to nine-year-olds, viewers’ problem-solving skills improved more than those of nonviewers after four weeks of watching the show.31 Similarly, evaluations of two popular science-based programs targeting older children (The Magic School Bus and Bill Nye the Science Guy) revealed that, compared with nonviewers, viewers demonstrated increased understanding of scientific concepts and the process of scientific discovery.32 Overall, the literature provides persuasive evidence that children can—and do—learn academic skills from educational media.
Educational Media and Social-Emotional Skills
When people use the term “educational media,” it is common to immediately think of content that supports traditional academic skills, such as literacy or numeracy. Indeed, most publications that rely on this term typically refer to Sesame Street’s influence on early academic skills and contextualize educational media within these contours. But as the founders of Sesame Street believed in the 1970s, media can teach more than academic skills. Educational media are equally suited, and perhaps even better suited, to teach social-emotional skills.
Despite the potential of educational media to promote social-emotional learning, research on this issue is scarce, particularly among young children. But a growing body of work has looked at media support for social-emotional development among older children and adolescents. Thus far, this work has focused on the role of media in supporting prosocial behavior (helping, friendliness, altruism) and other expressions of social-emotional learning, such as social competence and self-regulation.
Prosocial Behavior
In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, classic American family shows such as Lassie (1954–74) and The Waltons (1971–81) were among the most popular programs on television. Content analyses at the time revealed that these and other similar programs often contained prosocial portrayals of helping, friendliness, and altruism.33 And these programs increased children’s prosocial behavior. For example, in an early study, Joyce Sprafkin and colleagues demonstrated that children who viewed an episode of Lassie in which the protagonist helped the dog (Lassie) were more likely to help an animal presumed to be in distress than children who saw an episode devoid of this scene.34
By the 1980s, these kinds of programs were being slowly replaced by cartoons or animated productions such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which turned out to be immensely popular among children.35 These series were highly profitable. Production was relatively cheap, and the animated characters traveled well across different cultures. As a result, their licenses could be readily sold to other countries. It was not until passage of the Children’s Television Act in the United States that American developers were forced to refocus their efforts on educational content that expressly supported children’s informational or social-emotional development.
Soon after, the children’s media landscape saw a range of content emerge that was said to meet children’s social-emotional needs. Much of this content lived up to the letter rather than the spirit of the law (for example, there were claims that the cartoon The Jetsons taught about the future). That said, the Children’s Television Act did lead to an influx of content designed to support prosocial behavior.36 For example, Disney’s Doug was an animated program following the life of a socially awkward preteen as he managed typical preteen situations and emotions, such as trying to fit in, bullying, and (platonic) romantic relationships.
Along with this influx of prosocial programming, a multitude of studies have investigated whether and how prosocial media content contributes to prosocial behavior. Prosocial behavior in these studies refers to positive interactions such as friendly play or peaceful conflict resolutions, altruism (sharing, offering help), and stereotype reduction (changed attitudes and beliefs toward the opposite gender or other ethnicities). Most of these studies have focused on the effects of television. In 2007, Marie-Louise Mares and Emory Woodard conducted a meta-analysis to assess the effects of prosocial television exposure on prosocial behavior. Their results revealed that children who watched more prosocial content exhibited more prosocial behavior. They also showed that these effects increased sharply during early childhood and peaked around age seven, after which they declined throughout the tween and teen years.37
Mares and Woodard believe that the peak around age seven implies that younger children may not yet fully understand prosocial content on television, and may especially have difficulty extracting the prosocial messages in prosocial television. But the peak around age seven also implies that the effectiveness of prosocial programs declines after that age. A possible explanation for this age-related decline might be that the television programs included in Mares and Woodard’s meta-analysis were less attuned to the developmental level of older children, and were therefore not sufficiently appealing to them (see the moderate discrepancy hypothesis in chapter 4). If more age-appropriate and appealing programs had been used in the empirical studies included in their meta-analysis, the effects of prosocial programs might have been more pronounced among older children.
Several recent studies confirm that appealing and age-appropriate prosocial content can lead to prosocial effects among older children and teens. For example, Dutch researchers recently showed that tweens’ and teens’ watching of an episode of a teen-targeted news program featuring prosocial action for UNICEF led to more donations to UNICEF than watching an episode without the modeling of prosocial action.38 Similarly, a series of studies by Douglas Gentile and colleagues, conducted across three age groups (tweens, teens, adults) in three countries, found that playing prosocial video games such as Chibi Robo! increased players’ prosocial behaviors.39
Social Competence and Self-Regulation
We have now seen that educational media content can teach prosocial behavior, but can it teach other social-emotional skills? Can it teach children self-regulation? And can it teach social competence (that is, the ability to adapt positively to other persons and situations)? Perhaps as a result of the promising findings of studies on prosocial content, developers have begun looking at whether other social-emotional lessons can be taught through the media. We have seen, for example, an influx of apps meant to help children learn about emotions more generally, such as Daniel Tiger’s Grr-ific Feelings, Inside Out: Storybook Deluxe, as well as apps designed specifically to encourage empathy, such as Peppy Pals. Even Disney’s Pixar has gotten in on the action; its movie Inside Out focuses on how a young girl’s emotions (joy, fear, sadness) conflict when she moves with her parents from the Midwest to San Francisco.
Empirical research to confirm the effectiveness of content that addresses emotional and social competence is scarce but promising. Studies thus far have focused on young children. For example, Dimitri Christakis and colleagues devised an intervention in which a group of parents were encouraged to expose their children to high-quality educational programming such as Sesame Street, Dora the Explorer, and Super Why! After six and twelve months, the children in the intervention families showed higher levels of social competence than did children in the nonintervention families.40
A separate line of research in the area of social-emotional development indicates that educational media can also help support young children’s self-regulatory skills (that is, the ability to resist impulses and temptations that keep them from achieving their long-term goals). Children younger than eighteen months of age are incapable of self-regulation. Ask any little one to wait before enjoying a cookie, and you will quickly see the request is futile. By about two years old, children begin to learn how to resist temptation and repress unwanted behavior (see also chapter 4). Thus, it is around this age when efforts to support self-regulatory abilities can be particularly beneficial, and it was for this reason that Sesame Street decided to build self-regulation into its aims for the 2013–14 season.
Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster is the perfect character to teach children self-regulation. After all, just as the show’s viewers struggle with resisting delicious treats, so too does Cookie Monster (see figure 11.1). And just like his viewers, Cookie Monster often needs a little help with self-regulation. An experimental study by Deborah Linebarger investigated whether Cookie Monster could indeed teach children self-regulation. She exposed fifty-nine preschoolers in their homes to several clips featuring Cookie Monster rehearsing self-regulation strategies. Children’s self-regulation was measured with the marshmallow test, a classic delay-of-gratification task in which children get the option to eat one marshmallow immediately or to wait for fifteen minutes in order to get two marshmallows. Viewers of the Cookie Monster clips were able to wait on average nearly four minutes longer than nonviewers.41
Figure 11.1. Cookie Monster is the perfect character to teach young children self-regulation. (© 2015 Sesame Workshop. All rights reserved. Photo credit: Sesame Workshop)
Creativity
While there is growing evidence that educational media can support children’s academic and social-emotional development, can they also foster children’s creativity? All parents want to see their children grow into creative adults. Creativity is an ability that is well r
egarded in society. Multinationals spend loads of money to teach their staff how to think creatively or innovatively. Creativity, which is sometimes called creative imagination or divergent thinking, is the ability to generate novel or unusual ideas. In young children, creative thinking is typically expressed in their imaginative play, the play in which they transcend reality by acting “as if.”42
One of the clearest findings from studies of creativity is that adults who are creative tend to come from families that provided them with a favorable background for the development of intellectual abilities.43 Since environmental forces in childhood can affect later creative achievement, one might therefore expect that media use could be a socializing factor with a great potential to influence creativity. A considerable body of research has been designed to demonstrate that screen media use can be detrimental to creativity and imaginative play, but far fewer studies have been done to evaluate whether educational media use can support imaginative play and creativity.
In 2012, Patti Valkenburg and Sandra Calvert reviewed the existing literature to identify whether and when media support children’s creativity and imaginative play.44 In their review, they tried to identify whether the existing literature provided support for the stimulation hypothesis. This hypothesis states that well-designed educational media can enrich the store of ideas from which children can draw when engaged in imaginative play or creative tasks. More specifically, it posits that children pick up characters and events in these media, transform and incorporate these into their play and products of creativity, and as a result, the quality or quantity of their play and creative products is improved.
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