Concludes that children who watched crime shows identified with the television character but that attitudes toward the police were influenced more by attitudes of friends and family. (RB)

A study of the cognitive aspects of children's television watching addressed the following questions: To what degree is processing capability mediated by one's attentional set, as opposed to skills that one brings to the viewing situation? If attention is a significant mediating factor, is this true across various kinds of information one can…

Using open-ended questions to elicit responses from 77 kindergarteners, 24 second graders, and 25 fifth graders in New York, an attempt was made to determine how children perceive the accuracy and the reality of television programs. The kindergarteners and second graders tended to restrict their observations to specific visual traits, while the…

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:…

Describes a study of fifth grade students' ability to process information from a play, and compares the results to related information from television research. (JC)

A study examined whether television's stereotypical portrayals of men and women affected children's sex role preferences. The subjects, 105 fifth and 70 eighth grade students from a predominately black urban school in the southern United States, were assigned to see one of three versions of a videotape of a family drama in which male and female…

This study investigated the effects of intraprogram synopses on children's comprehension of essential and peripheral content of an action-adventure television drama. The impact of these synopses on the comprehension of commercials also was investigated. A total of 30 second graders and 30 fifth graders participated. Synopses were presented to…

Examines the claim that television does not actively involve the viewer cognitively in ways usually associated with mature information processing. Study is described that suggests active and differential processing of television information by viewers and an increase in the level of sophistication in understanding the medium. Twenty-six references…

Much of the television American children watch is violent in content. The evidence indicating that this programing increases children's aggressive behavior is not clear-cut, and some studies have shown a decrease in children's aggressive behavior. A study was conducted to test a more developmental perspective on the effects of violent television:…

Describes a media literacy project that provided fifth graders with a hands-on approach to study of television form and nature of message transmission to improve their understanding of media-related concepts. Results of a media literacy test reveal course participants performed significantly better than the control group. (MBR)