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9 July 2012

Reading Storybooks More Effective Than Showing Educational DVDs

Keywords: DVD, babies, education, language, media, parents, television, North America, experiment,

Showing educational DVDs seems to be an easy way to stimulate babies’ vocabulary development, but easy is not always effective.

According to a study in the British Journal of Development Psychology, the most effective strategy for developing babies’ language is reading storybooks. The more children are being read to, the more words they learn.

Take aways

  • Educational DVD’s are not successful in stimulating babies’ vocabulary development.
  • However, babies do learn new words when they are being read to by one of their parents.
  • So, educational DVDs should be developed with reading material (i.e., storybooks) to stimulate parents to read with their children in order to actually stimulate babies’ vocabulary development.

Study information

  • The question?

    What’s the effect of showing an educational DVD on babies’ word learning?

  • Who?

    45 children aged 12-15 months (mean age: 59 weeks old; 26 boys and 19 girls; 60% of the babies are white, 20% latino/hispanic, 9% African-American, 2% Asian-American and 9% other multi-ethnic groups) and their parents.

  • Where?

    California, United States.

  • How?

    Half of the parents were asked to show their child the Baby Wordsworth DVD fifteen times in a six week period. The other half of the parents were not given specific instructions and were asked to follow their daily routines. At four points during this six week period, parents were given a list of 30 words and asked to indicate whether they believed their child had learned any of the listed words (i.e., understanding a word or saying a word). Parents were also asked for their child’s media environment, including time spent watching television and DVDs, television exposure in the background, and the amount of time they are being read to.

Facts and findings

  • There was no difference in word vocabulary between the group of children who watched the Baby Wordsworth DVD and the group of children who didn’t. 
  • However, there were other interesting findings:
    • For every 15 minutes a child was read to, the child’s average score for understanding words increased with 3.01 words and the child’s average score for words said increased with 0.61 words (out of the 30 words highlighted in the DVD).
    • For every 30 minutes a child was exposed to background television (either television or DVD), the child’s average score for understanding words increased with 0.30 words and the child’s average score for words said increased with 0.069 words (out of the 30 words highlighted in the DVD).
  • An explanation for this finding is, that children who hear television in the background, have greater vocabulary input, and therefore know and reproduce more words. But according to the researchers this explanation is more a guess and therefore it would be irresponsible to recommend parents to leave the television on whole day. Especially because television is taking away interaction time with parents, siblings or friends.