Children's and adults' recall of children's news stories in both print and audio‐visual presentation modalities

Abstract

Research into adults' recall from different presentation modalities has demonstrated a recall advantage for print over television yet recent research indicates that children remember television news better than print news. An experiment was conducted by comparing children's and adults' recall of children's news stories presented in two different modalities, television and print, in order to establish whether children's recall advantage for television is dependent on their age or level of reading proficiency. A sample of 40 adults, 40 13-year-olds and 40 11-year-olds were presented with children's news stories, either in their original televised form or in a print version. All participants were aware they would be tested for recall. The results of the cued recall test indicated that children from both age groups learned more from the television news than from the print versions, regardless of age or reading proficiency and that adults remembered equal amounts from both presentation modalities. For the 11-year-olds the advantage of television was only found for information that had been accompanied by redundant pictures in the televised version, providing support for the dualcoding hypothesis. For 13-year-olds the recall of television was not dependent on the addition of redundant visual information. Viewers and readers were found to invest the same amounts of mental effort, but reported levels of invested mental effort were found to be dependent on age and level of reading proficiency.

Do illustrations enhance preschoolers’ memories for stories? Age-related change in the picture facilitation effect

“…The finding that illustrations enhanced memory only for details presented in both modalities is compatible with previous studies suggesting that redundancy between verbal and visual information might be necessary for visual stimuli to enhance verbal memory in young children (Digdon et al, 1985;Furnham et al, 2002;Guttman et al, 1977;Pressley et al, 1982). The most common explanation is that, consistent with the literature on the development of imagery as a memory strategy (e.g., Pressley, 1977Pressley, , 1982Schneider & Pressley, 1997), younger children are less able to generate mental images of the nonpictured items.…”

“…For example, some studies have suggested that for recall of auditory stimuli to be facilitated by the addition of visual stimuli, younger children require greater redundancy between the visual and auditory information than do older children (Furnham, De Siena, & Gunter, 2002;Guttman, Levin, & Pressley, 1977). In one such study, Guttman and colleagues (1977) presented kindergartners, second graders, and third graders stories on tape with no pictures, complete pictures illustrating the content of each sentence, or partial pictures depicting the same information as the complete pictures except that the object to be asked about in the recall test was omitted.…”

Learning with videos vs. learning with print: The role of interactive features

“…Doubts arise from several studies comparing the effectiveness of videos to content-equivalent print (e.g., DeFleur, Davenport, Cronin, & DeFleur, 1992;Furnham & Gunter, 1985, 1987Gunter, Furnham, & Gietson, 1984;Gunter, Furnham, & Leese, 1986; Walma van der Molen & van der Voort, 2000; Wicks & Drew, 1991;Wilson, 1974). Whereas for children (that assumedly lack reading proficiency) and low complex material (for example, children's news), retention and understanding were equal or even in favor of videos (Furnham, de Siena, & Gunter, 2002;Walma van der Molen & van der Voort, 1997, for adolescent or adult viewers and complex matters, several studies repeatedly found videos to be inferior to print when it came to recalling the facts mentioned in the medium -even when presentation time was held constant over the different conditions. These findings were replicated for different genres such as news broadcasts (Furnham & Gunter, 1985;; Walma van der Molen & van der Voort, 2000), political broadcasts and television commercials (Furnham, Benson, & Gunter, 1987).…”

The Effectiveness of Applying Multimedia Web-Based Technologies in Culinary Skills Training

“…if information are presented with pictures and narration simultaneously, on-screen text will be redundant and will lead to the increase of cognitive load, as cited in Toh, Munassar, & Yahaya (2010)) was discovered when visual inputs were presented. However, some studies suggest that learners tend to have better comprehension as well as retention of content when it is presented as text (Furnham, 2002) because overwhelming information will cause cognition overloaded (Lowe, 2003). In other words, the effectiveness of teaching materials delivered through multimedia is still under debate, and little research has been conducted from the perspective of hospitality education (Ali et al, 2014).…”