Introduction
Methodology
Watching DVD educational baby media program and parent-teaching condition was the independent variable in the study. Children`s learning of new words was the dependent variable. The type of methodology was experimental. There were four groups formed for the study. Three groups were experimental groups and one group was a control group. The general sample of the study included 72 children in the age between 12 to 18 months.
Researchers who conducted this study designed four conditions for participants of the experiment. The first condition (the first group) was video-with-interactions. This condition meant that parents could watch the DVD movie together with their children and interact with their children during this watching in a natural way. The second condition (the experimental group) was titled as “video-with-no-interaction”. In this case, children watch the video alone, while their parents were engaged in other activities. The third condition (the third experimental group) named “parent-teaching” meant that children were not exposed to video watching at all. At the same time, their parents following special instruction tried to teach their children to understand 25 words which were featured in the video. The four conditions were the control condition. The fourth group of babies did not get any special experimental influence.
There was no hypothesis of the study. Instead of making some suggestion, researchers tried to find the answer to the question if visual media has some cognitive benefits for the infants. Another purpose of the study was to examine if there is any correlation between children`s language improvement and parental evaluation of what role play watching baby media in this improvement.
Results
Results of posttest can find in the Figure 1 (DeLoache, Chiong, Sherman, Islam, Vanderborght, Troseth & O’Doherty, 2010, p. 1572)
Results of the study showed that only scores of learning new words by children in the parental teaching group were above a chance (p < .05). Children from the “parental-teaching” group indicated correctly more words than did children from three others group. Also, as we see on the chart children from two video-condition groups learned for the one month as many words as did the control group where children were not exposed to video- or parent-teaching conditions.
Results of the study also demonstrated that there is no positive correlation between the real language development of a child and parental assessment of how much DVD watching influenced this development. It means that parents estimated the influence of DVD watching independently of how many new words their children had learned. At the same time, there was the positive correlation between how much parents liked the DVD-product for babies and how highly they evaluated the influence of the video on their children`s development (r = .64, p < .01).
Conclusions
Results of this study gave the clear answer on the main questions of the research. It showed that infants and toddlers do not have great benefits for their language development by watching baby media. Watching DVD baby program infants can learn no more words than can do those children who do not watch any educational baby video. These results are consonant with results of previous similar researchers.
Also, the study showed that parents tend to overestimate the positive role of DVD baby products in the case if parents like the video. However, high appraisals of video by parents are not associated with real developmental improvements of their children.
Generally, we can state that authors tried their best to exclude possible limitations of the study and increase the validity of the study. However, like every study, the current research also could not avoid some disadvantages. For example, we know that intellectual abilities, some personal traits, etc. can be determined by nature. Researchers conducted the current studies examined initially what words every child knew or did not know. However, it was unknown what general intelligence every of participants had. It is possible that children from “parent-teaching” group could have genetically determined higher intellectual abilities and these predispositions influenced the final results.
References
DeLoache, J. S., Chiong, C., Sherman, K., Islam, N., Vanderborght, M., Troseth, G. L., & O’Doherty, K. (2010). Do babies learn from baby media?. Psychological Science. 21(11) 1570 –1574
