Abstract
The study investigates to what degree two different joint media engagement (JME) strategies affect children’s learning from two-dimensional (2D)-media. More specifically, we expected an instructed JME strategy to be more effective than a spontaneous, non-instructed, JME strategy. Thirty-five 2-year old children saw a short video on a tablet demonstrating memory tasks together with a parent. The parents were randomized into two groups: One group (N = 17) was instructed to help their child by describing the actions they saw on the video while the other group (N = 18) received no specific instruction besides “do as you usually do.” The parents in the instructed group used significantly more words and verbs when supporting their child but both groups of children did equally well on the memory test. In a second step, we compared the performance of the two JME groups with an opportunistic comparison group (N = 95) tested with half of the memory tasks live and half of the tasks on 2D without any JME support. Results showed that the JME intervention groups received significantly higher recall scores than the no JME 2D comparison group. In contrast, the three-dimensional (3D) comparison group outperformed both JME groups. In sum, our findings suggest that JME as implemented here is more effective in promoting learning than a no JME 2D demonstration but less so than the standard 3D presentation of the tasks.
Highlights
Over the last decades, digital media has become seamlessly integrated in the life of families, a societal change that impacts children’s early experiences
The current study investigates if a specific joint media engagement (JME) instruction to parents leads to better learning from two-dimensional (2D)media than when parents are allowed to choose spontaneously how to interact with their child as measured by how much the children remember of a video demonstration of a deferred imitation test presented on a tablet
The groups differed significantly with respect to the total number of words the parents used during the video demonstration of the tasks, t(32) = 5.73, p < 0.001, d = 1.96, and with respect to Instructed JME N = 17
Summary
Digital media has become seamlessly integrated in the life of families, a societal change that impacts children’s early experiences. According to Ewin et al.’s recent review, it is relatively common for parents to attempt some kind of JME strategy such as prompting, cognitive scaffolding, or various dialogical strategies They further suggest that many parents seem to transfer their knowledge on how to deal with traditional TV-viewing to the new digital media environment. The successfulness of these strategies depends, on factors such as parental skills, educational level, socio-economic status (SES), and ethnicity. Another factor that Ewin et al (2020) brings up is that sometimes the media in itself hinder the parent’s attempt to create a JME situation when watching together with a young child. About half of the studies comes from North America, about a fifth from Europe and only one single study represents Scandinavia (Norway)
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