Educational Videos: Do They Help or Harm Language Development?

Educational Videos: Do They Help or Harm Language Development?

Ashley Stringer-Franco

PSY/600 Developmental Psychology

Tanya Semcesen

June 3, 2013

Educational Videos: Do They Help or Harm Language Development?

In a human being's life, education is one of the most important areas that they focus on to make sure that their children become somebody one day. However in the several years before a child can enter preschool, a parent often wonders what it is they can do to prepare their child for school. Many parents turn to what they think is the next best things, which are educational videos. With the videos being educational, that means that they help more than they harm right? Unfortunately that is not always the case when it comes to educational videos. In fact a study has found that the educational videos may actually do more harm than good with a child's language development (University of Washington, August 8, 2007). Language development is basically described as a method in which children come to recognize and converse language during the beginning years of their life. Naturally most humans believe that since educational videos communicate with the children through video, they will therefore learn language development. However it is not always that easy because language in a child develops in all sorts of ways depending on the child. The goal of this essay is to help the reader understand that just letting children experience educational videos, might actually be doing more harm than good. Hopefully then the reader will come to better understand the way language develops in young children (Berk, 2010).

Regardless of advertising declarations, parents should watch out whom they put their faith in helping their baby's language development. Even though parents only want to give their baby's an increase in learning language, they actually need to put boundaries on the quantity of time they let their children watch educational videos like "Baby Einstein" and "Brainy Baby." Instead of assisting infants, the excess of such creations in fact could really reduce the speed in which babies eight to sixteen months old can obtain their vocabulary. Researchers found this out when they did a study at the University of Washington and at the Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute. The researchers established that whenever a baby sat and watched an educational video for at least an hour, babies comprehended fewer words than babies who did not watch the educational videos. There was even a six to eight difference in the words the babies knew when compared to the other babies. Infant DVDs and educational videos show no signs of being positive or negative when it comes to the vocabularies toddlers between the ages of seventeen and twenty four months (University of Washington, August 8, 2007).

Leading the study as the lead author is University of Washington associate professor of health services, Frederick Zimmerman. He believed that there was one significant fact that came from this study and that was that there was no obvious proof of a positive stemming from the infant educational videos but there is some implication of impairment. He found that the end result is that as a child watches more and more infant educational videos the larger the effect. In fact he believed that the quantity of educational viewing really is important. However Fredrick Zimmerman could not do the study alone so he had two co-authors in the study with him. The co-authors in the study were a pediatrics researcher at Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute and a University of Washington professor of pediatrics, Dr. Dimitri Christakis and co-director of the University of Washington's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, Andrew Meltzoff (University of Washington, August 8, 2007).

The study is a fraction of a bigger assignment glimpsing at the course of media screening from age zero to two years of age and probing the subject matter of what the infant is watching and the effects that it has on the young children. The very same researchers also published a study that showed that forty percent of infants start watching television, educational videos, or DVDs regularly by the age of three months. By the age of two years, this number jumps alarmingly from forty percent to ninety percent. With both studies, the researchers carried out interviews over the phone with as much as one thousand families in the Minnesota and Washington areas, that had a child that was two years or younger. In order to make the study fair, the researchers put the educational videos into four different categories: Infant DVDs and educational videos; educational shows on TV, DVDs and educational videos like Dora the Explorer, Go Diego Go, and Arthur; a child's TV show and movie that is not educational like Land Before Time, SpongeBob SquarePants, Finding Nemo, and Madagascar and TV for adults like Family Guy, Maury, and sports entertainment (University of Washington, August 8, 2007).

Within these four categories the researchers could not establish positive or negative effects on babies of different ages when they looked at whether they viewed educational media or media that was not educational or even from adult TV shows. According to Meltzoff, who is also the Job and Gertrud Tamaki endowed chair in psychology at the University of Washington, the outcome surprised all of the researchers even if they were logical when they looked at it. They showed that there are