Children's Recall of Televised and Printed News as a Function of Test Expectation

An exploratory study was carried out to investigate the relative effectiveness of news stories watched on television and news stories read by children. Children aged 10 to 12 (n = 123) either watched five news stories or read print versions of the same news stories. In each condition, half of the children expected a retention test, whereas the other children did not. Results indicated that children who did not expect a retention test learned more from television news than from printed news. Among children who expected a retention test, televised and printed news were recalled about equally well.     

Content not form predicts oral language comprehension: the influence of the medium on preschoolers’ story understanding

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of digital and non-digital storybooks on low-income preschoolers’ oral language comprehension. Employing a within-subject design on 38 four-year-olds from a Head Start program, we compared the effect of medium on preschoolers’ target words and comprehension of stories. Four digital storybooks were adapted and printed for read-alouds. Children were randomly read two stories on the digital platform, and two by the assessors. Following the story, children completed vocabulary and comprehension tasks, and a brief motivation checklist. We found no significant differences across medium; children comprehended equally well regardless of whether the story was read digitally or in person. However, using repeated ANOVA measures, we found a significant main effect of the story read. This research indicates that the content of the book rather than its form predicts story comprehension. Implications for using digital media in the preschool years are discussed.     

Young Children,Television & Learning: Part II. Comparison of the effects of reading and story telling by the teacher and television story viewing

Three groups of 6‐ to 7‐year old children were used to compare the effects of stories read by a teacher with stories viewed on educational television. Weekly, for ten weeks, a story was read to Group A while the same story was seen on television by Groups B and C, Group B being prepared for the story by the teacher and given appropriate follow‐on. Questioning for understanding and recall showed that, at the end of the ten weeks, the largest gains were made by the Group B children, who showed improvement in their classification ability and in application of their understanding to domains beyond the confines of the immediate story structure. Television was preferred by the children for its pictures, movement and action, and generated more detailed understanding and recall, but only when the stories were interpreted and rationalised by the teacher. Video recorder replay is helpful, and teachers need to be taught how best to manage story‐telling with young children     

Does the Cognitive Interview Promote the Coherence of Narrative Accounts in Children With and Without an Intellectual Disability?

We examined whether the cognitive interview (CI) procedure enhanced the coherence of narrative accounts provided by children with and without intellectual disabilities (ID), matched on chronological age. Children watched a videotaped magic show; one day later, they were interviewed using the CI or a structured interview (SI). Children interviewed using the CI reported more correct details than those interviewed using the SI. Additionally, children interviewed using the CI reported more contextual background details, more logically ordered sequences, more temporal markers, and fewer inconsistencies in their stories than those interviewed using the SI. However, the CI did not increase the number of story grammar elements compared with the SI. Overall children interviewed with the CI told better stories than those interviewed with the SI. This finding provided further support for the effectiveness of the CI with vulnerable witnesses, particularly children with ID.     

Maternal scaffolding and children’s narrative retelling of a movie story

Five-year-old children (n = 31) watched a brief videotaped segment from a movie with their mother, discussed the movie story with her, and then retold it to an experimenter. The quality of the stories the children told was related to the scaffolding strategies used by their mothers. Children whose mothers focused their own and the children’s attention on the story, prompted the children’s memories with questions and explanations, talked about the characters’ emotions, corrected the children’s mistakes, and engaged in extended exchanges about critical topics in the story during the preparatory discussion told significantly better stories than children whose mothers did not use such strategies and children in a control group (n = 14) who did not discuss the story with their mothers. Children’s recall of objective actions in the story was most strongly predicted by joint mother-child attention, extended exchanges on critical topics, and the mother’s correction of the children’s mistakes. Children’s comprehension of characters’ internal states was most strongly predicted by the number of questions the mother asked, extended exchanges, and correction. These findings have implications for how adults can promote children’s ability to understand, remember, and narrate a story.     

Children's use of motives and intentionality in person perception and moral judgement.

Preschool, second-, and fifth-grade children watched films and heard stories which portrayed an actor who intentionally or accidentally injured another for either good or bad motives. After each film or story, children were interviewed to determine their understanding of the actor motives and the intentionality of his act and their moral judgements. The results suggest that children of all ages understood the concepts of motive and intentionality, but that the ability to make accurate inferences about motives and intentionality develops with age. Motives affected children's evaluations at all ages, but intentionality affected only grade school children's evaluations. The results for moral judgment were discussed in terms of a theory which included features of both cognitive-developmental and social learning explanations of moral development.     

Literacy Through the Book Arts

Children as readers and writers-and now as book artists too. Paul Johnson shows how children can be helped to learn the skills of book-making, thus empowering them as writers and illustrators by helping them to become the creators of beautiful books. The story grammars of different cultures include the way a story is laid out for people to read; Paul Johnson describes book designs from various cultures and shows how different book forms require children to read and tell stories in certain ways. Illustrations of various designs are shown within the article.     

What is a real story? Investigating the perceptions of Key Stage One children

This small‐scale piece of research stemmed from a larger study on oral storytelling and the responses of children to stories told and read to them. In the larger study several children expressed preferences for stories from picture books, as told stories were not real stories. This concept of real stories and what constitutes a real story in the eyes of an infant child, aged between five and seven years, is what led to the basis of the research. One hundred and thirty‐five children between the ages of five and seven years old were involved in the research. The investigation was conducted in three different schools in South Wales, UK. It was hoped that the research would give some insights into the literacy habits of children today. The children were asked some basic questions about home practices relating to storytelling and story‐reading and about preferences in relation to oral stories and picture books. Finally they were asked if they thought oral tales were real stories. This essay gives an overview of some of the literacy practices of the children and deliberates on their comments as they wrestle with the concept of a real story.     

Learning to Learn From Stories: Children's Developing Sensitivity to the Causal Structure of Fictional Worlds

Fiction presents a unique challenge to the developing child, in that children must learn when to generalize information from stories to the real world. This study examines how children acquire causal knowledge from storybooks, and whether children are sensitive to how closely the fictional world resembles reality. Preschoolers (N = 108) listened to stories in which a novel causal relation was embedded within realistic or fantastical contexts. Results indicate that by at least 3 years of age, children are sensitive to the underlying causal structure of the story: Children are more likely to generalize content if the fictional world is similar to reality. Additionally, children become better able at discriminating between realistic and fantastical story contexts between 3 and 5 years of age.     

Young children's comprehension and recall of computer screen displayed text

In this study 26 third grade and 36 fifth grade students, experienced in computer-assisted instruction, were randomly assigned to one of two treatment conditions: computer screen displayed text or traditional printed page text. According to assigned treatment condition, subjects either read a story from the computer screen or printed page booklet. There were no statistically significant differences between the two treatment conditions on measures of reading comprehension. On the attitude survey subjects reported greater interest in the story when reading from the computer, however, they reported that the story was more difficult when reading from the computer screen. The results of the study suggest that extended reading of prose materials on computer screens is feasible for children as young as eight years of age.     

Television Police Dramas and Children's Beliefs about the Police

An experimental study was carried out among three groups of children aged 10 to 16 years, two of whom were shown episodes from two UK‐produced police drama series and the other (control group) viewed nothing. Children were tested one week before the viewing sessions and immediately afterwards with a series of questions about their perceptions of the police and police work, their real life contact with the police or crime, and details of their television viewing habits and demography. Both viewing groups were tested for their comprehension of the police drama episode they had been shown. Results showed that older children were better able than younger children to follow dramatic plots, but that the evidence for an effect of single television drama episodes on children's beliefs about the police was less clear‐cut. Both children in the two viewing groups and those in the control group exhibited some shifts in their perceptions of the police. Children who watched the television episodes, however, were more likely to show opinion shifts in relation to specific attributes of the police or police work which were strongly featured in the programmes.     

Effect of personalized basal stories on the reading comprehension of fourth-grade poor and average readers

Forty fourth-grade children were assigned randomly on a stratified basis to read either standard or personalized basal stories and answer comprehension questions. The results of the study indicated that children previously identified as poor readers comprehended more information when they read personalized, as opposed to standard, stories. No difference was found among children of average reading ability on this variable.     

Chinese and Canadian Children's Evaluations of Lying and Truth Telling: Similarities and Dfferences in the Context of pro-and Antisocial Behaviors

The present study compared Chinese and Canadian children's moral evaluations of lie and truth telling in situations involving pro- and antisocial behaviors. Seven-, 9-, and 11-year-old Chinese and canadian children were presented 4 brief stories. Two stories involved a child who intentionally carried out a good deed, and the other2 stories involved a child who intentionally carried out a bad deed. When story characters were questioned by a teacher as to who had committed the deed, they either lied or told the truth. Children were asked to evaluate the story characters' deeds and their verbal statements. Overall, Chinese children rated truth telling less positively and lie telling more positively in prosocial settings than Canadian children, indicating that the emphasis on self-effacement and modesty in Chinese culture overrides Chinese children's evaluations of lying in some situations. Both Chinese and canadian children rated trugh telling positively and lie telling negatively in antisocial situations, reflecting the emphasis in both cultures on the distinction between misdeed and truth/lie telling. The findings of the present study suggest that, in the realm of lying and truth telling, a close relation between sociocultural practices and moral judgment exists. Specific social and cultural norms have an impact on children's developing moral judgments, which in turn, are modified by age and experience in a particular culture.     

Deriving word meanings from context: does explanation facilitate contextual analysis?

The ability to derive the meanings of words from supportive story contexts was studied in 45 7‐ to 8‐year‐olds. Children read short stories each containing a different novel word and defined the word at the end of each story. There were three intervention sessions. One group was asked to justify their definition and subsequently received feedback on its accuracy. A second group was given feedback first and asked to explain how the experimenter knew the correct answer. A third (control) received feedback only. In general, practice led to improved performance, with an increased number of children in all groups using the story context to derive meanings for the novel words in a post‐intervention test. Children in the two explanation groups made the greatest gains in definition accuracy. The implications for teaching vocabulary learning skills are discussed.     

Weaving new meanings: evaluating children's written responses to a story telling resource package

This paper documents an evaluation of children's written responses to a story telling package used in an intervention project set up by the National Association for the Teaching of English as part of the larger Inspire Rotherham literacy campaign. The brief was to provide a group of primary teachers with innovative and inspirational approaches to raise the aspiration of Key Stage 2 children (age range 7‐9) and to improve their skills in story writing. The schools, who were self‐ selecting, were given a DVD of a professional story teller narrating tales appropriate to the age group, used alongside drama and role play workshops which helped the teachers engage children in aspects of narrative. The children were asked to retell one of their own favourite stories in writing before hearing the DVD stories and then to repeat this activity at the end of the 6‐week project. They were asked to include both pictures and writing. Their texts were analysed to provide both quantitative and textual data. Children were shown to have adopted many features of the language of the oral narratives they had heard in the second task improving both the structure and imagery of the stories they produced.     

Together I Can! Joint Attention Boosts 3- to 4-Year-Olds’ Performance in a Verbal False-Belief Test

Effects of joint attention were addressed on 3- to 4-year-olds’ performance in a verbal false-Belief Test (FBT), featuring the experimenter as co-watcher rather than narrator. In two experiments, children (N = 183) watched a filmed-FBT jointly with a test leader, disjointed from a test leader, or alone. Children attending jointly with a test leader were more likely to pass the FBT compared with normative data and to spontaneously recall information indicating false-belief understanding, suggesting that joint attention strengthens the plausibility of the FBT and renders plot-critical information more salient. In a third experiment (N = 59), results were replicated using a typical, image-based FBT. Overall findings highlight the profound impact of experimenter as social context in verbal FBTs, and link recall of specific story features to false-belief understanding.     

Does God Make It Real? Children’s Belief in Religious Stories From the Judeo‐Christian Tradition

Four- to 6-year-old children (N = 131) heard religious or nonreligious stories and were questioned about their belief in the reality of the story characters and events. Children had low to moderate levels of belief in the characters and events. Children in the religious story condition had higher levels of belief in the reality of the characters and events than did children in the nonreligious condition; this relation strengthened with age. Children who used God as an explanation for the events showed higher levels of belief in the factuality of those events. Story familiarity and family religiosity also affected children's responses. The authors conclude that God's involvement in a story influences children's belief in the reality of the characters and events in that story.     

Teaching With Televised Stories: A Story-Focused Narrative Preview Supports Learning in Young Children

Researchers examined the effects of previewing on preschoolers’ comprehension of narrative and educational content in a television program. Children (3–5 years, N = 107) watched an educational math episode in one of three conditions: no-preview control, education-focused expository preview, or story-focused narrative preview. A main effect of previewing was found, controlling for age, character familiarity, prior knowledge, and visual attention. Specifically, the narrative preview enhanced both narrative comprehension (including central, incidental, and inferential content) and educational comprehension (including direct learning and transfer), compared to a no-preview control. Conversely, the expository preview had no effect on comprehension. Findings are interpreted with respect to story schema and relevant cognitive theories of learning from media. Implications for educational media production are discussed.