Piaget meets big bird: Is TV a passive teacher?

Young Children, Television & Learning: Part I. The effects of children watching a continuous off‐air broadcast

“…Lesser (1972) maintains that television is a vehicle for direct teaching by telling and showing what it is intended that children should learn, then teaching them by telling and showing it to them and finally by telling and showing them again what they have been taught. This contention is reinforced by Fowles & Voyat (1974) who maintain that television facilitates rote verbal learning; this refutes those educators who consider the medium to be a "passive learning tool in that the learning that goes on will generally take an imitative mode" while Fowles & Homer (1974) insist that the American series, Sesame Street, has proved not only that children learn from television but that active interaction is not always necessary for learning to occur. Scherer (1977), meanwhile, considers that educational television is not unlike books in libraries and just as necessary.…”

Young people and the media: Special Issue

“…As Fowles and Voyat (1974) pointed out, the traditional developmental theories which remain the source of much inspiration and guidance were, in the main, formulated before even television took hold and certainly, we can now add, before the spread of new media. Many of the ongoing debates and concerns of our field reflect early theorists' attempts to explain human development in a very different world from the one in which young people now live.…”

“…Insightful developmentalists stressed some time ago the distinctive and potent ways in which television can engage, stimulate, and even accelerate children's cognitive capacities (Fowles & Voyat, 1974; Greenfield, 1984; Wackman & Wartella, 1977; Williams, 1981). Studies of children and television were given a major impetus in the 1980s by the discovery that viewing processes are far more cognitively active than popular mythology assumes (Anderson & Lorch, 1983; Kirkorian, Wartella, & Anderson, 2008).…”

“…These topics have certainly been addressed, but it is fair to say that mainstream cognitive developmental work has not tuned into the media, despite the fact that since the middle of the last century (and hence throughout the explosion of cognitive developmental research) the environment in which cognitive development proceeds has been distinctively multimodal and multimedia (Fowles & Voyat, 1974). Linebarger and Piotrowski (pp.…”

“…There are many ways in which Piagetian theory speaks to the interactions between young people and their media (Fowles & Voyat, 1974; Wackman & Wartella, 1977). But perhaps the most fundamental Piagetian point is the one that needs most often to be reiterated: from a developmental perspective, the media are not a set of entities that are fed into passive recipients irrespective of developmental status, readiness, and motivation.…”