Word: richert
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This time, psychologist Rebekah Richert and her team did those studies one better. She randomly assigned two groups of babies to either a Baby Wordsworth or control group, then carefully tracked how many of the 30 target words highlighted in the video the babies were able to learn. The words were those that children would commonly hear around the house, such as table, ball, piano, fridge and chair. Parents were asked to evaluate how many of these words their babies understood and how many they could speak, while toddlers were tested separately for their recognition of pictures associated with...
...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...
Another reason videos inhibit word-learning may simply be that they replace precious parent-child time that could be spent learning the same words. If babies are watching a DVD, they are not engaging or communicating with their parents. In Richert's study, her team found that the most learning occurred when parents directly taught children new words by pointing at an object, saying its name and repeating it. In the final session in the lab, the researchers observed parents and their youngsters as they watched Baby Wordsworth together; the children's ability to learn words in these situations...
Based on the evidence, the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended for several years that toddlers under age 2 not watch videos or television, and Richert's findings support that advice. But she notes that it's not an all-or-nothing situation. "Given that media is becoming a consistent aspect of children's environment, there are ways that parents can use these DVDs," she says. "They can use them to sometimes teach children, but they should be aware that without being involved themselves, children aren't likely to learn." As enticing as new technologies may be in improving children...