Noting that the use of captions in television newscasts has grown from simple labeling of newsmakers to more complicated titling of graphics and enumerating important points in a script, a study examined the extent to which captioning assisted viewers in learning from different types of television news stories. Subjects, 100 undergraduate journalism students, viewed news stories in a quiet classroom. They first viewed a dummy story followed by a brief distractor test meant to purge short-term memory and prevent rehearsal of story information. Subjects then viewed actual news stories of two types, concrete/picture stories and abstract/word stories, in which the caption variable was manipulated. For each news story, subjects identified whether freeze frames they were shown had appeared in the dummy story and answered multiple choice questions (testing both recall and understanding) about the content. The process was repeated until five more stories had been viewed. Results indicated that captions did improve recall for the abstract/word stories, but impeded understanding in the concrete/picture stories. Captions may have impeded understanding of the picture stories by distracting attention from the visuals. On the other hand, because word stories do not lend themselves to reinforcing visualization, cues like captions serve as reinforcements. This implies that news producers would do best to omit captions from stories with strong visual content and use caption graphics to clarify abstract, word oriented stories. (References, notes, and two tables conclude the study.) (SKC) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. *********************************************************************** U.& DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Rosearch and improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) is document has been reproduced as 't h owed from the person or organization originsting it O Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. Points of view or ognions stated in tins dont,. mint do not necessarily represent °Matt OERI position or policy. CAPTIONING EFFECTS ON TELEVISION NEWS LEARNING
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