Group News Watching and Discussion to Increase the Current Affairs Awareness of Retarded Adolescents

Abstract

Retarded young persons, and particularly those in residential settings, often exhibit severe deficiencies in their knowledge of current affairs and contemporary news events outside the institution. Such current affairs knowledge deficits accentuate the "differentness" between retarded young persons and their nonretarded peers, and may serve to prevent the successful community functioning of many retarded individuals. In the current study, the news awareness of eight retarded adolescents was assessed using daily verbal news quizzes. In multiple baseline fashion, a group television newswatching plus brief discussion was sequentially introduced across two groups of adolescents; additionally, a TV news exposure-only condition was used with one of the groups. The results indicated that while passive TV newswatching alone resulted in little change in news awareness, contingent upon the introduction of TV newswatching plus brief discussion, all subjects showed substantial improvement in their current affairs awareness. On several probe days, news quiz performance of the retarded adolescents was compared to the performance of 10 nonretarded high school students who viewed the same network news program; retarded subjects who received the TV plus discussion intervention performed at levels comparable to their nonretarded agemates on these probe days. Implications for the use of cost-and-time efficient group TV newswatching/discussion interventions for retarded young persons in residential settings are discussed.