Tuesday, 6 January 2015

Reading schemes and children's television

Which reading schemes are commonly used in schools?

Primary schools have a range of reading schemes to choose from. The most popular include Oxford Reading Tree (ORT), Collins Big Cat and Rigby Star, but other schemes are also used, including Lighthouse, Storyworlds and New Reading 360. Some schools continue to use older series, such as Ginn and New Way. [1]

How do children learn from TV:
Children react very positively to inclusive television programmes like Dora the Explorer or Blue’s Clues. Whenever a character faces the camera and asks a question, children out there in TV land are usually answering it. Blue’s Clues has been credited with helping young children learn from the screen. Academic research has shown that viewers’ ages 3 to 5 score better on tests of problem solving than those who haven’t watched the show. Experiments conducted at Vanderbilt University, described in the May/June issue of Child Development, offer some hints about toddlers. They showed that 24-month-olds are more apt to use information relayed by video if they consider the person on the screen to be someone they can talk to. Without that, the children seemed unable to act on what they had seen and heard. The experiments compared two video experiences: One was based on a videotape. Watching it was similar to watching “Blue’s Clues”; the actor onscreen paused to simulate a conversation, but back-and-forth interaction with the viewer was impossible. A different group of children experienced two-way live video. It worked like a Web cam, with each side responding in real time. The test hinged on a hiding game. First the 2-year-olds watched the video — either the tape or the live version. The screen showed a person hiding a stuffed animal, Piglet, in a nearby room, often under a table or behind a couch. When the video ended, the children were asked to retrieve Piglet. Those who saw the recorded video had some trouble. They found him only 35% of the time. Children in the other group succeeded about 69% of the time, a rate similar to face-to-face interaction.[2]
Most kids plug into the world of television long before they enter school. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF):
  • two-thirds of infants and toddlers watch a screen an average of 2 hours a day
  • kids under age 6 watch an average of about 2 hours of screen media a day, primarily TV and videos or DVDs
  • kids and teens 8 to 18 years spend nearly 4 hours a day in front of a TV screen and almost 2 additional hours on the computer (outside of schoolwork) and playing video games [3]]
Another article I found says that children do not learn from TV:
Some children had conversations with a person face to face, some used video chat such as Skype, and others watched a film of someone instructing another child who was off screen. In the study, published in the journal Research in Child Development, the children learned new words only when conversing with a person face to face or through live video chat. Learning researchers discovered that young children need to have real conversations with other people to develop language. They didn't learn the new words through the pre-recorded video instruction, which was not responsive to the child. Children who learned in the two environments that involved real-time social interaction even used the new words to label the actions when different people performed them, the researchers from the University of Washington, Temple University, and the University of Delaware found. [4]

No comments:

Post a Comment

Gerrard and Carragher

Gerrard and Carragher
Best picture of all time