The Active and Healthy School Program (AHS) can be used to alter the culture and environment of a school to help children make healthier choices. The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of AHS to increase physical activity while decreasing total screen time, increase healthy food choices, and improve knowledge about physical…

Mass media have numerous effects on children, ranging from influencing school performance to increased or reduced aggression. What we do not know, however, is how media availability in the bedroom moderates these effects. Although several researchers have suggested that bedroom media may influence outcomes by displacing other activities (the…

Reaffirms previous findings that young viewers' representations of televised dramatic narratives are incomplete and disorganized, compared to older viewers' comprehension of these programs. Also demonstrates that the information younger children retain from programs was likely to reflect stereotyped actions and events, cued by isolated, familiar…

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…

Describes a 1979 study of fifth-, eighth-, and eleventh-grade students that was conducted to investigate television viewing behaviors. The study focused on overall viewing activity, content decisions (i.e., loyalty to individual series or to a genre), and program stability (i.e., how often viewers change channels during a program). (14 references)…

Investigates relationships between television viewing and both the content and form of children's event representations. Examines two narratives, a "television" story and a "real-life" story, written by children in grades three, five, and eight, for the presence of particular kinds of content and for presentational style and…

Two studies examine the nature of Japanese elementary school and junior high school students' preconceptions about media, the effects of teachers on these preconceptions, and the effect of such preconceptions on learning from instruction in multimedia situations. In the first study, 109 fifth graders reported their preconceptions toward watching…