Toddlers get a kick out of giving adults a hard time. True to form, these wobbly-legged knowledge-sponges learn virtually nothing from best-selling DVDs that their parents believe will boost vocabulary and trigger academic superstardom.
Young children who viewed a popular DVD regularly for one month, either with or without their parents, showed no greater understanding of words from the program than kids who never saw it, according to a study slated to appear in Psychological Science.
“The degree to which babies actually learn from baby videos is negligible,” says psychologist and study director Judy DeLoache of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
Still, adults who initially liked the DVD thought that their children learned many words by watching it. DeLoache suspects that some parents mistakenly assume that educational DVDs such as Baby Einstein prompt the spike in word learning that naturally occurs between 12 and 24 months of age (SN: 4/25/98, p. 268).
Annual sales of Baby Einstein products now reach about $200 million in the United States. Other companies sell competing educational DVDs in what is now an international business.
DeLoache calls the educational DVD she used in her new study “one of the best available” but wouldn’t identify the brand.
Direct interaction with adults reigns supreme as a learning tool in the first few years of life, DeLoache holds. In her new study, youngsters displayed a word-learning advantage if their parents spent a month trying to teach words from the DVD whenever they had time and however they thought best, without ever playing the program for the children.
“This new paper and others give us little reason to believe that watching DVDs and videos will enhance young children’s language learning,” comments psychologist Roberta Golinkoff of the University of Delaware in Newark.
By showing that parents can teach words directly to their kids better than a DVD can, DeLoache’s study “indicates the importance of having a social partner in learning,” remarks psychologist Michael Robb of Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Penn.
Robb and his colleagues tracked 1- to 2-year-olds who watched Baby Wordsworth, one of the Baby Einstein DVDs, with or without their parents for six weeks. At a final viewing session with parents, DVD-watchers used no more words from the program than same-age kids who were seeing it for the first time, the team reported in the May Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
For DeLoache’s study, scientists randomly assigned 72 kids, ages 12 months to 18 months, to one of four month-long conditions. Some watched a 39-minute DVD by themselves, and others with a parent, at least five times a week. In the third group, parents were given a list of 25 words (mostly the names of household objects such as clock) featured in the DVD and told to teach as many as possible to kids in whatever way seemed appropriate. Finally, some kids neither watched the DVD nor received parental instruction about words from the program.
Before the experiment started, an experimenter tested each child at home for his or her understanding of 13 words from the DVD. The children failed to recognize between five and 12 of the words.
When tested one month later, children who hadn’t seen the DVD but received vocabulary help from their parents knew, on average, half of the words that had previously eluded them. Youngsters in the other three groups — even those who had merely carried on as usual — identified about one-third of formerly unknown words.
Related evidence indicates that kids under age 3 don’t grasp the relation between what they see on a screen and the physical world (SN: 4/10/10, p. 9). Most don’t realize that a symbol — say, a horse on television or a small-scale replica of a stuffed animal — corresponds to a real-world object, DeLoache suspects.
Logs kept by parents during the study often included descriptions of their children’s intense DVD-viewing habits, DeLoache notes. “She loves the blasted thing,” one mother wrote. “It’s like crack for babies.”
That may partly explain why parents who favor educational DVDs erroneously claim that their toddlers learn a lot from them, Golinkoff suggests. “Kids can look so rapt when they watch these videos that parents may think that attention equals learning, when clearly it does not,” she says.
