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Kara Garrity Presents New Research at the 2009 Eastern Communication Association Convention

04/24/2009

Kara Garrity, a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication and researcher within the Children’s Media Lab, presented new research at the 2009 Eastern Communication Association Convention.   In her paper, titled  “The role of "school schema": Children's comprehension, recall, and generalization of information from television”,  Kara discusses the role that a child's school schemata can play when processing television messages. Specifically, she argues that young children develop a school schema from experience with school and, when activated, this schema can create a demand for learning that mimics what a child encounters in the classroom. She hypothesizes that, by utilizing a school setting in television messages, children’s attention and comprehension of content will be enhanced.  

In order to test her hypothesis, preschool children viewed five health public service announcements.  The messages were comparable in length, featured the same host character, and were stylistically similar.  One of the messages utilized a school setting while the remaining messages utilized other settings (e.g. home, store).   After repeated exposure to the messages, children’s recall of the content as well as their ability to transfer the learned content was evaluated.   The research confirmed the study hypothesis.   Children recalled and subsequently transferred more information from the health message that invoked a school setting when compared to those messages that did not utilize a school setting.   The results offer important implications for both practice and theory.