Children's and Adults' Recall of Television and Print News in Children's and Adult News Formats

Experiments comparing television and print news have shown that children learn most from television, whereas adults learn most from print. An experiment was conducted in which both 96 children (5th and 6th graders) and 96 adults (university students) were presented with a sequence of five news stories, either in their original televised form or in a printed version. Half of the participants were presented with stories taken from a children's news program (high audiovisual redundancy), whereas the other participants were exposed to corresponding stories adopted from an adult news program (low audiovisual redundancy). Results indicated that both children and adults learned most from television stories when presented in a children's news format, whereas the recall advantage of television disappeared when adult news stories were involved. The results suggest that the correspondence between verbal and visual content of television stories is decisive for the relative effectiveness of television and print.

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