| Repetition In Children's Media |
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| Written by Ingrid Bruynse | |||||
Page 1 of 3 Background to early child development The early years, the period up to 8 years of age, is a time of vital growth and development for the whole range of human capacities. This period starts when the child is in the womb and a healthy newborn is fundamentally dependent on its mother’s level of nutrition and care during pregnancy. Nutrition in utero has a major effect on adult height (Floud, Wachter and Gregory 1990). Following birth, adequate care of the newborn is also closely linked to the mother’s health and nutritional status. Up to the age of 8, the young child grows rapidly, particularly his brain. By the age of 8, while the average person has attained approximately 50% of their adult body weight, the brain has attained 90% (Rutter and Rutter 1993). Consequently, this is a time of great importance for cognitive, emotional and psychological development. Further, there are critical periods when certain kinds of stimulation lead to particular kinds of brain development: emotional control ages 0-2, vision, ages 0-2, social attachment, ages 0-2, vocabulary, ages 0-3, second language, ages 0-10, math/logic ages 1-4, and music, ages 3-10 (Begley 1996). During this key development period, the number of cells in some areas of the brain can almost double within as little as a year. The brains of children aged between two and three are 2.5 times as active as adult brains and remain more active for the first ten years of life (Mustard in Young 2002b). Figure 1. Brain Development by Age  The role of repetition in children’s media Research that has originated from the work of Jean Piaget including that by Jerome Bruner, Maragret Donaldson and others suggests that children are active in their learning and are not passive receptive receptors. What this means for the media we expose our children to is that children need some measure of self-directed control of their environment. We need to understand their phase of development and provide media and experiences that interest and challenge them at an appropriate level. Robert Fantz developed a test with a “looking chamber” in a cot. This showed that babies have a preference for complex shapes. From six months, this shows babies can distinguish what they are looking at and actively seek visual experience that is varied, and complex, as opposed to simple. This seeking of complex learning environments grows with development and continues to adulthood. We should then make media that includes more complex information than we see the child displaying. In the development of thinking, memory is very important. Very young babies can remember. They respond to the familiar. By seven to nine months, babies can recognize familiar from unfamiliar. This is the age when stranger anxiety occurs. The unfamiliar person is not recalled, and babies react to this with anxiety. (Hayes 1993). In media making and educational programming, we build on the development of recognition and recall from this age on, where children recognize characters, phrases, contexts, which are repeated either by pure repetition, also repetition in another context and finally formats where we know what to expect and can build on this familiarity better to move into new stories and contexts for the characters to interact and solve problems. Part of this familiarity is repetition. Media that intends to be educative requires careful sequencing, conceptual layering, repetition, and time to think, imagine and practice ideas. (SABC Education Research, Gultig and Musker (2001) Education requires careful sequencing, conceptual layering, repetition, and time to think and practice ideas. Television is ephemeral – miss an idea and you have missed it! One cannot page back and have another look. DVDs however can use careful sequencing, where concepts are repeated, learning in one episode can then be referred to in the next, so building knowledge. Where television carries argument, it does so through the sequencing of images, not through verbal argument, and ideally, does this in short sound/picture-bytes. Consequently television is not good at complex messages, at abstract arguments. But for concrete early learning it can convey image and meaning. Education requires active mental participation. Education is about encouraging thinking, imagining and problem solving. The use of repetition strategies allows opportunities for further engagement and interaction because the content becomes more familiar. When a child hears it and sees it again, they learn. For an adult this may come across as unnecessary and repetitious, because they have already learnt this. Why repetition?
Educational programmes are conceptualised and designed through research and careful educational planning. Repetition in programmes creates a known context, a familiar format, from which children are able to recognise the characters, the context, and are then able to move their learning to the new specific information in each episode as an opportunity for learning the unfamiliar in the context of the familiar. Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) did research on Sesame Street. They found some interesting things about repetition: CTW researchers discovered a more complicated relationship between repetition and learning. Learning increased when repetition took place in three distinct ways: when the same segment was viewed repeatedly over a number of episodes, when the content was repeated within one episode but in a different format, and when the same format was used repeatedly to teach different content. Conclusion was that children watched for different things every time they watched the content being repeated. (Appendix A) For children and adults, we learn better when we understand the context of the new knowledge we acquire. In a repeated format, we know that MacGyver will meet the baddies, invent something, and escape to triumph at the end. In repeated content, we know and expect that Dub or Teletubbies will say goodbye at the end and wave. Again format repetition in a tertiary context - we know and expect that a university lecture will consist of a talk, taking notes and Q&A in a formula of expected experiences, and so we can absorb the other learning – the meaningful different content, better. What this means for Pampers Play and Learn African stories is that we need to provide the familiar daily context, the waterhole, and this provides the familiar, then we move on the new African story in each case. For adults, we prefer our familiar formula of repetition to be less obvious – based on formats, genres but for young babies and children, they require direct content repetition, as well as repetition in another context that is both explicit and includes obvious content repetition – the same words, the same information again. After the age of 8, children prefer more adult-type genre format repetition than direct content repetition. Pampers Play and Learns use of moving pictures, and its ability to communicate instantly across long distances, makes it a powerful motivator and campaigner. It can excite, and can be used to distribute simple messages/slogans, whether these are phonic, linguistic, social, political, or health-related (etc). First, education is often about learning abstract content, complex concepts, detailed argument, and cognitive skills. In other words, learning is often verbal and invisible rather than visual and explicit. Broadcast television's privileging of the visual often 'hides' the argument; we watch in fascination, and our fascination prevents us from hearing the complexity of arguments. However, media that can be repeated, paused on DVD, placed into context, repeated - can use a show and tell method of learning extremely effectively with children at the concrete operations phase. Ingrid Bruynse BRIGHT LEARNING MEDIA |
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