Educational Programming

The title of the article is The Role of Television Viewing in the development of Reading Comprehension. The longitudinal research study looks at children's comprehension of television shows as compared to the aural reading of a story. The researchers cited past research that hypothesized television shows impair cognitive skills needed for comprehension. The past investigations have produced mix findings about the impact of television on children. The present research seeks to answer what effect does television have on pre-school students and their later achievement in reading comprehension. The study looked at 28 pre-school four year olds and 95 first grade students. Participants were asked to view a televised program and then they were asked to answer a series of comprehension questions. They also took a series of comprehension tests. The researchers found that children performed better on the television memory and comprehension than on the aural story and memory comprehension task. This article only presented preliminary results. All of the data was not yet collected when the article was written. Further analyses of the data would reveal the relationship between early literacy skills and comprehension and memory. After reading the article, I researched and found a follow-up article that will hopefully give me more definitive results. This article was discarded from the pile and was only used to gather more information.