Children's memory for news: A comparison of three presentation media

A study was conducted to compare children's learning of news information fr om television versus from audio-only or printed text presentations of the s ame narrative content. Although previous research among adults has yielded contradictory findings, research with children has found that they consiste ntly remember news better from television than from print. The experiment e xtended this work by comparing children's recall of news information from d ifferent presentation media and investigating whether the effectiveness of the different media is dependent on expectation of a memory test and the ch ildren's reading proficiency. A sample of 166 male and female 10- and 11-ye ar-olds was presented with a sequence of news stories taken from a children 's news program Either in their original televised form, in soundtrack only or in a print version. Half of the children were led to expect a memory te st, and half were not. The results of the cued recall test indicated that c hildren learned more from television news than from the print and audio ver sions, regardless of their reading proficiency The advantage of television was found only for information that had been accompanied by semantically re dundant pictures in the televised version, providing support for the dual-c oding hypothesis.