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Children's recall of the news: TV news stories compared with three print versions

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Abstract

A partial replication study was conducted comparing children's recall of news stories presented via television and via print. Unlike the procedure in previous experiments, television news stories were compared not only with literal transcripts of the television narratives, but also with two different “real” newspaper versions written by journalists. In addition, the study investigated whether the relative effectiveness of television and print in conveying news information was dependent on children's reading proficiency. A sample of 144 fourth and sixth graders was presented with a sequence of five children's news stories, either in their original television form or in one of the three print versions. The results of a cuedrecall test indicated that children who watched the news on television remembered the stories better than children who read one of the three print versions, regardless of their level of reading proficiency.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Child and Media Studies, Leiden University, P.O. Box 9555, 2300 RB, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Juliette H. Walma van der Molen (assistant professor) & Tom H. A. van der Voort (professor)

Authors
  1. Juliette H. Walma van der Molen
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  2. Tom H. A. van der Voort
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Correspondence to Juliette H. Walma van der Molen.

Additional information

This research was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (Project Number 575-87-706).

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van der Molen, J.H.W., van der Voort, T.H.A. Children's recall of the news: TV news stories compared with three print versions. ETR&D 46, 39–52 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02299828

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