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Effects of Viewing Television Opening with children grow up listening to news of violent acts committed by citizens in their communities with television and movies showing interpersonal violence catches the readers interest, but a more realistic representation of television must be both positive and negative. Mass homicides on school grounds intensified public concern over school violence, which has been increasingly more lethal since 1997. Dealing out death to the bad guys is as natural as good triumphs over evil. At least, we do not live in a world where the bad guy wins. Homicide remains the second leading cause of death among teenagers and the leading cause of death among African American males. With this dramatic opening, the reader might wonder, why discuss educational television at all.
Parents do not go into the public school demanding to know what their children are being taught other than when they are invited in or have a need to go it. Parents trust the well-educated teachers to teach their children what they need to know. The authors of educational television are equally well educated and have exhausted hours upon hours projecting just the right content. They spent multimillion dollars to better prepare children for school, get information to the public in news programs and public television, to even put out weather notifications of impending dangerous weather. Educational television provides enormous opportunities. Sesame Street International is a result of years of academic study and multimillion dollars.
Educational television serves new experiences, enriches academic knowledge, motivates, and nurtures social skills. When television became widely available half a century ago, the average amount of time children spent watching television ranged between 1 hour, 36 minutes and 2 hours, 54 minutes per day. Literature on educational effects of television has received little attention because research published in this area is scattered in the Journal of Educational Psychology, Educational Technology Research and Development, and the Journal of Mathematical Behavior. Significant literature exists in conference papers, technical reports, or research reports to producers and stakeholders. Television is blamed for educational dilemmas, poor national test scores, academic skills, and levels of literacy by the displacement hypothesis. Television viewing takes us from homework, productive leisure activities, and reading, but the relationship between television and academic achievement is not simple or direct.
The Children's Television Act of 1990 defined educational informational programming to further the positive development of the child in any respect, including the child's cognitive / intellectual or emotional / social needs (FCC, 1991). A significant portion of Sesame Street teaches information to the children in the audience that they do not already know (e. g. , the alphabet, vocabulary, historical or scientific information, and applied information for everyday life) (p. 5). Sesame Streets objectives are pro social to increase literacy in academic subjects. Empirical research assesses how well Sesame Street achieves its objectives. Studies show that educational television has made significant gains in preschool and school-age children's academic knowledge or skills.
Transfer of learning refers to application of knowledge or skills to a new problem or situation not encountered previously, but viewers did not differ significantly from non-viewers in their ability to transfer skills to a new problem. With regards to pro-social behavior which is modeled is learned through interactions and observations of family, peers, and others in a wide variety of contexts, including home, school, and all of the other settings in which children spend time. Several studies have confirmed that children acquire social behavior from television and look to television as a source of social learning. The American comedy Happy Days included dating behavior and being cool.
A 1999 survey for the Kaiser Family Foundation found that American children spent an average of 2 hours and 46 minutes per day watching television, 21 minutes per day on computers, 20 minutes on video games, and 8 minutes on the Internet. This study was confirmed by a national survey conducted at the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. While billions of dollars was spent on this prestigious research, others conduct unofficial surveys with simple questions (Social Statistics, 2009). How many hours a week do you watch TV? How often do you go for a walk? Are you afraid of the dark?
The unofficial results suggest that 30 % of adults are at least a little bit afraid of the dark. Only 8. 5 % do not watch television, and another 10 % watch an hour or less per week. Fifty percent of respondents watch 15 hours of television or more each week. Fifty two percent of the respondents do not go for walks even once per week. Norman Herr, Phd. (2009) reports on studies that demonstrate television viewing may have serious health consequences. Herr points out that the average child watches 8, 000 murders on TV before finishing elementary school.
By age eighteen, the average American has seen 200, 000 acts of violence on TV, including 40, 000 murders. Dr. John Nelson of the American Medical Association used 2, 888 of 3, 000 studies that show TV violence is a public health problem. " Heavy TV viewers exhibit five dependency symptoms needed for a substance abuse diagnosis. They use TV as a sedative and view it indiscriminately. They feel loss of control while viewing it, and are angry when they watch it too much.
They do not have the ability to stop watching it, and they are miserable when they are kept from watching it. A National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 1995 found 4. 7 million children ages of 6 - 17 were severely overweight, twice as many as in the 1960 's. Inactivity, watching more than 22 hours of television per week, the average child eats junk food while watching 200 ads for junk food in four hours of children's cartoons per week. Advantages and disadvantages of watching TV retrieved on May 8, 2009 from web disadvantagesofwatchingtv Fisch, S. (2004). Children's learning from educational television: Sesame Street and beyond. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Retrieved on May 8, 2009 from web n-and-education. jsp. Social statistics "How many hours a week do you watch TV? retrieved on May 8, 2009 from web Television & Health was retrieved on May 8, 2009 from web Unhappy people watch TV, Happy people read and socialize was retrieved on May 8, 2009 from web
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Research essay sample on Effects Of Viewing Television
