HOW MUCH CAN CHILDREN GAIN FROM TELEVISION P

Abstract

ABSTRACT Today every child in an Infant or Junior school will almost certainly watch schools’ television as part of their education. Nearly every child will watch TV at home, often for a considerable proportion of his free time. A survey of TV use in Plymouth by Plymouth Educational Television showed that in 1971 and 1972 every Infant and Junior school in that city used some TV each week. A Swedish survey in 1968 showed that most 3 year olds have begun to watch TV attentively; 90% of 3‐4 year olds usually turn on TV to watch a programme, and 75% of 5 year olds keep track of the time for a specific TV programme (Feilitzen & Linne, 1968). In view of this widespread use of TV by young children, particularly in the educational field, it might be expected that much would be known about young children's perception and understanding of television. In fact there has been very little work done, and the research findings there are conflict. It would seem that answers to questions like — how much information does a 5 year old retain from a TV programme? What is the attention span of an infant age child? How skilled is the young child in accurately perceiving images on television? ‐‐ would be of great interest to both producers and consumers of Educational television. However, the research just does not seem to be in progress. There is a considerable amount of relevant background information available which suggests results which might be found and this paper will review this and summarise the conclusions to be drawn.