Children can and do learn from screen media under certain conditions (see Monday’s post for an overview). But how do they learn? Research tells us that it’s a process!
Learning information from a screen and being able to use that knowledge in real life requires three main cognitive processes: attention, comprehension, and transfer. Children have usually developed the cognitive skills necessary to attend to, comprehend, and transfer information from screens around three years of age. Let’s dive into each of them.
ATTENTION
The first step in learning from screens is attention. In order to learn, children need to pay attention to the main educational lesson and use their cognitive resources to ignore distractions and irrelevant details. Children must use both selective attention (to control what they are looking at) and sustained attention (to control how long they are looking) in order to learn from screens. The longer a child sustains their attention, the more likely they are to learn.
Contrary to popular belief, watching TV is hard work for young kids! It requires a great deal of cognitive resources to pay attention to the right content and understand what is going on. That is why when a child is absorbed in their favorite show it can be difficult to get their attention–their cognitive resources are focused on learning! Rather than being zoned out, they are actually intensely focused. The longer they devote focused attention to the screen during an educational program or game, the better they will be able to form memories about the information shown on screen.
Attention is driven both by the child’s own individual characteristics as well as the characteristics of the media. For example, a show that has strong auditory and visual features like sound effects and scene changes may help an inattentive child look at the screen. Once the child is focused on the screen, visual features can help to guide their focus toward the most important content. You may notice that some educational TV shows use movement and color contrast around character’s faces to help direct children’s attention to the important content.
COMPREHENSION
Next, children need to comprehend not only the educational lesson but also the plot of the story or rules of the game. There are many levels of comprehension involved in learning with media. Children must understand the words, gestures, and behaviors of the characters on screen. Additionally, they need to understand that different elements of a narrative fit together in a storyline. For interactive media, children additionally need to understand the mechanics of how to use the device and rules of the game. Once they comprehend the features of the medium and content, children must also understand the basic principles of the educational lesson.
Comprehension and attention are closely related–kids are more likely to comprehend information they pay attention to, and are more likely to pay attention to information that they understand and can easily comprehend. Overarching these processes is a cognitive function called working memory. Working memory is a short-term system for storing and processing information in the brain. It controls how we take in, utilize, and remember information every day. There is a limited capacity to working memory, especially in young children, which requires them to carefully allocate their cognitive resources to the most important information on screen in order to learn.
TRANSFER
Finally, children must be able to take the content they learn on screen and use it in their everyday life. This requires them to both remember the lesson and apply it in new contexts. While screens are a 2D source of information, the majority of what children learn through educational media is intended for use in the 3D world. In order to transfer a lesson from 2D to 3D, children need to create flexible mental representations of the educational lesson. Tasks that require a child to only transfer the information over a small difference (like counting apples on a screen to counting apples in real life) are relatively easier to transfer than tasks that require the child to flexibly apply what they learned (like counting apples on a screen to counting penguins at the zoo). This is one reason why repetition is extremely beneficial for young children’s learning from screens. Varied repetition, where a child views one lesson in multiple different ways, is particularly effective in supporting children’s ability to learn content from the screen and transfer it into their real life.
Despite the large number of cognitive resources required for children to learn from screens, research has found that children can and do learn from educational media. Come back on Friday for actionable tips about helping your child transfer lessons from the screen to real life!