Compares American middle-class children, as representatives of heavy television viewers, and Israeli middle-class children, as representatives of lighter television viewers, to determine the extent to which accumulated television viewing enhances the development of particular mental skills. (PD)

This paper discusses the rationale for a cross-cultural (Israeli-American) study of the cognitive effects of the television media on children. The overall purpose of the study are: (1) to examine the extent to which exposure to television has an effect on children's mastery of cognitive skills; and (2) to examine the extent to which activities of…

Cites evidence from an Israeli study which indicates that media effects on cognition interact with a child's initial level of skill mastery. (MH)

The results of a field study, a controlled experiment, and clinical observations on the educational effects of "Sesame Street" on Israeli children are summarized in this report. An overview section presents the general format and major findings, the next section describes the background setting of the studies, a method section covers the…

This report presents two research studies. The first, an experiment using 176 fifth graders, tested three hypotheses: (1) When content is held constant across messages, different formats of a medium differentially call for mental skills. (2) Formats which call for the same skills in different ways affect learners differently. (3) The TV formats…

Using 280 5th graders as subjects, an experiment was carried out to answer the following questions: (1) do certain indentified television formats have effects on cognition? (2) Is mastery of various cognitive skills correlated with extraction of knowledge from a television message which employs the corresponding format? It was hypothesized that:…

This is an initial examination of findings from laboratory and field studies done in Israel on the cognition-cultivating functions of media. The studies reasoned that highly explicit presentations of film-mediated operations can be imitated by observers, and that once imitated, they are internalized and can serve as modified mental skills. Two…

The airing of "Sesame Street" on Israeli television in 1971 provided an opportunity to study the effects of a sophisticated media format on a media naive audience. Samples of 93 kindergarteners and 224 second and third graders of mixed socioeconomic background were pre- and posttested for cognitive skills and media literacy. After…