Much time and space has been devoted to such questions as “What does television do to the child?”; and “How do children use television?”; The findings of research into these questions often are unsatisfactorily vague and ambiguous. Laymen (and our own common sense) tell us that there must be more effect from the spending of many hours a day before the television set than has been evidenced in formal research reports to date. One unusual— and provocative—effect of television is reported upon in the following article: there seems to be a difference in how children of different social classes talk about television. Both the observations and the speculations of the following article may lead others into the sort of byway that may prove more productive than the “mainline”; of research on television and children.

Children's Television Workshop.

Social class differences in how children talk about television

page 2 Chapters Four and Five present guidelines for achieving cognitive learning goals and behavorial goals. The guidelines for cognitive goals are; Learning Through Play, Visual Attention, Selective Attention, Retention and Learning, Imitation, and Reality. The guidelines for behavorial goals are derived by the author from his experiences in producing those segments: they stress clarity, justification, shortness, visual means to show resolution, tempered language and action, and fair and equitable solution. Chapter Six examines some important production values for choosing content and for directing attention, and discusses the child's response to the concept, to the sound track and to humor and incongruity. The final chapter calls for many more children's programs, each with carefully-defined and complementary purpose, rather than expanding present programs to serve multiple purpose which would dilute their effectiveness.

Children's Television Workshop.

Citations

Social class differences in how children talk about television

Guidelines for better children's television programming : a report on the program design features developed by the Children's Television Workshop.

Related Papers (5)

Educational television in Japan

The uses of television in education.

Research at the Children's Television Workshop.

Children Look at Television.

Children's Attention to the Television Screen: A Time Series Analysis.