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Prof. Deborah Linebarger, Research Fellow Jessica Taylor Piotrowski published in Child Development

Thursday, September 23, 2010
    
Deborah L. Linebarger, Ph.D. (left), and Jessica Taylor Piotrowski, Ph.D.

Deborah L. Linebarger, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Communication and Director of the Annenberg Children and Media Lab; and Jessica Taylor Piotrowski, Ph.D. (Gr ’10), Research Fellow in the Children and Media Lab, have published the article “Structure and Strategies in Children’s Educational Television: The Roles of Program Type and Learning Strategies in Children’s Learning” in the journal Child Development (September/October 2010, Vol. 81, Number 5).
 
Abstract:

Educational TV has been consistently linked to children's learning. In this research, educational TV characteristics were identified, coded, and tested for their influence on children's program-specific comprehension and vocabulary outcomes. Study 1 details a content analysis of TV features including a program's macrostructure (i.e., narrative or expository) and learning strategies embedded in the macrostructure that support learning in print-based contexts. In Study 2, regression analyses were used to predict outcomes involving 71 second and third graders (average age = 7.63 years). Strategies were categorized as organizing, rehearsing, elaborating, or affective in function. Outcomes were uniformly higher for narrative macrostructures. Strategies used in narratives predicted relatively homogenous relations across outcomes, whereas strategies in expositories predicted quite heterogeneous relations across outcomes.
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