Word: dvds
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...hard to avoid logging screen time of some kind on a daily basis, and that's true even in young children. Babies in the U.S. start watching TV early on, with educational DVDs and television shows designed to encourage early language development in pre-preschoolers...
...question is, Do instructional DVDs actually help babies learn? To find out, researchers at the University of California at Riverside designed the most definitive study of the issue to date. The study used a DVD called Baby Wordsworth (part of the Baby Einstein series), which is aimed at teaching babies new vocabulary words, and assigned a group of 12-to-24-month-olds to watch it daily for six weeks. Turns out, the videos didn't work. There was no difference in language acquisition between children who were assigned to watch the DVD and a control group. (See pictures...
...results, published on Monday in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, are in line with several other studies. In fact, past analyses have found that infants who watch educational DVDs learn fewer words and score lower on certain cognitive tests by the time they reach preschool than kids who haven't watched the videos. These studies, however, were all observational - meaning that rather than assigning babies to watch videos or avoid them, scientists simply asked parents about their babies' viewing habits and then correlated that information with the kids' performance on tests of word acquisition and language skills later...
...found that over the course of six weeks, the children watching the DVDs didn't learn any more words than children not watching," says Richert...
...Dimitri Christakis, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle, whose studies were the first to dispute the claim that educational DVDs improve babies' language skills, noted the importance of Richert's findings in advancing our understanding of how babies learn - or, in this case, don't learn - language. "The novel thing here is that this is actually the first experiment in the real world using these products to robustly test their claims," he says...