Infant and Child Development

Inf. Child. Dev. 19: 553556 (2010) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/icd.716

Introduction

Special Issue on the Content and Context of Early Media Exposure

Rachel Barr and Deborah L. Linebarger
Exposing infants to screen media is a hotly debated topic. Part of the debate stems from perceived inconsistencies in the accumulated evidence. Correlational research has provided a number of associations between exposure and outcomes (both positive and negative; for review see Courage & Howe, 2010). Experimental evidence shows that when learning conditions are equated infants learn less from video than from live face-to-face interactions (i.e. video decit, Anderson & Pempek, 2005). As the research literature has accumulated, however, it has shifted from simple main effects models to more complex interaction models of analysis. This complexity is captured through the analysis of three distinct but inter-connected classes of variables that mediate and moderate the relationship between exposure and child outcomes: child attributes, stimulus features, and the contexts in which exposure occur (see Linebarger & Vaala, 2010). There are two main purposes of this special issue: (1) empirically demonstrate the shift away from research that examines simplistic cause and effect models to research that examines the causal mechanisms underlying how effects are pro duced (Clark, 1983; Dupre & Cartwright, 1988; Hedstrom & Ylikoski, 2010; Kozma, 1994) and (2) focus on an ecological perspective and, as such, simultaneously consider the effects of content and context of early media exposure. Cause and effect models presume that learning is a receptive response to content delivery whereas models that incorporate causal mechanism-based explanations view learning as an active cognitive process inuenced by the social, affective, and contextual variables present during a specic learning event (Clark, 1983). Dening causal mechanisms involves articulating the intersection among the child, the environmental context, and the ways in which both inuence how a child ultimately interprets and learns from program content. An ecological perspective provides a way to conceptualize these processes as substantive and theoretical[ly] signicant (p. 626, Bronfenbrenner, 1995). It is these transactions that drive development and these transactions that are both affected by characteristics of the child and of the context in which these transactions occur. From Cause and Effect to Causal Mechanism In 2008, we partnered to develop and implement a eld-based longitudinal study. The difference between this study and earlier research by both of our labs

*Correspondence to: Rachel Barr, Department of Psychology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057, USA. E-mail: rfb5@georgetown.edu
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(Barr, 2008, 2010; Linebarger & Walker, 2005) is that we designed the study as an experimental intervention. This design was selected because we wanted to investigate the underlying structure and functions of media exposure. Given the serious and sometimes contentious debate surrounding infants potential exposure to screen media content, it was crucial that the intervention development process be grounded in scientically rigorous research. Focus on the delivery system alone leads to simple cause and effect explanations whereas the method of instruction (i.e. content and the structural features used to convey that content and context of viewing) offers much more powerful explanatory models for the observed effects (Clark, 1983; Kozma, 1994). For instance, early viewing (age 5) of Sesame Street predicted higher grades and more leisure book reading in adolescence while early viewing of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood predicted higher creativity scores (Anderson, Huston, Schmitt, Linebarger, & Wright, 2001). Consistent with this argument we hypothesize that associations between early media exposure and infant development are determined by both content and context. Content and Context in Learning from Infant-Directed Media After articulating a causal pathway, the next step was to conduct a detailed content analysis of infant-directed media. The rst step in the content analysis involved the generation of a series of coding schemes that captured key characteristics of supportive learning opportunities in live interactions to use as a starting point to examine developmental appropriateness of DVD content. These coding schemes examined a number of macro-level features of the DVDs including the educational claims made by content producers, the degree of match between these claims and actual content (Fenstermacher et al., a this volume), and the presence of quality of depicted interactions between adultchild and childchild characters (Fenstermacher et al., b this volume). Micro-level features included the identication of the formal features used to structure program content (see Goodrich, Pempek, & Calvert, 2009) and the presence and quality of language-promoting strategies that support these skills when engaging with similar content delivered via other media forms (e.g., books, free play, classrooms, language interventions; Vaala et al., this volume). Results based on these content analyses indicate that the majority of infant products are structurally similar. Content is most often conveyed outside the context of adultchild or peer-to-peer interactions. Without such support, it can be especially challenging for infants to make sense of content, regardless of the media forms that were used to present the content (Fenstermacher et al., b this volume). Most of the micro-level strategies that we found in infant-directed content (e.g., simple descriptive talk and labeling) promoted lower-order content processing that consequently may result in the formation of developmentally unsophisticated conceptual and vocabulary knowledge understanding (Vaala et al., this volume). These ndings are not necessarily incompatible with the exposure - outcomes simple main effects models; however, those models do little to explain why these relationships exist. Without knowledge of the underlying causal mechanisms, it is difcult to determine what types of content and which structural features can create developmentally appropriate content and optimal learning situations. To answer these questions contextual factors need to be examined. Therefore, three additional studies in this volume focus on the context of media exposure complementing the detailed content analysis. In each study, the researchers tested the inuence of specic content (Allen & Scoeld, this volume) or
Copyright r 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Inf. Child. Dev. 19: 553556 (2010) DOI: 10.1002/icd

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contextual variables in the context of intervention studies (Fender, Rickert, Robb, & Wartella, this volume; Mendelsohn et al., this volume) on word learning and language development. These ndings demonstrate that parents are likely to be important mediators of infant language development in the context of co-viewing (Fender et al., this volume) and may also moderate potential negative impacts of different types of media content (Mendelsohn et al., this volume). Toddlers also show word learning from television when the production features of the content are quite minimal (Allen & Scoeld, this volume), suggesting once again that the structure of the media content, as well as the way that learning is measured are important factors in understanding language outcomes as a function of media exposure. These studies are strong examples of the types of research that will advance our understanding of the causal mechanisms responsible for important developmental outcomes such as language. While the sequence of events that occur between exposure and outcome will be governed by a number of regula rities, this sequence is not rigidly bound by these regularities (Dupre & Cartwright, 1988). Part of the process associated with determining the causal chain from exposure - outcome is determining whether and where contentbased and contextual factors will manifest their inuence. Kozma (1994) writes that the foundational assumptions and goals that guidey research are shifting from a view of the world as a set of law-like relations between observable causes and effects that act uniformly across situations to a world of interacting causes that join together to produce events (p. 15). He argued this perspective as a way to move media effects research from whether media do inuence learning to whether media will inuence learning. While his analysis was based on educational technology and school-age children, the underlying premise is applicable to any research that is concerned with explaining the sequence of events or conditions that lead children on a path from exposure to outcomes. This special issue focuses on the shift in the literature away from simple main effects models that offer only associations between exposure and outcomes, toward complex models that include the myriad of factors interacting and inuencing developmental outcomes and specication of the causal mechanisms that drive associations between exposure and outcomes.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The contents of this document were developed in part under a cooperative agreement between the US Department of Education, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Public Broadcasting System for the Ready to Learn Initiative (PR No. U295A050003) with Deborah Linebarger (and a subcontract to Rachel Barr). Disclaimer: This content does not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education and should not be assumed to be endorsed by the federal government.

REFERENCES
Anderson, D. R., Huston, A. C., Schmitt, K. L., Linebarger, D. L., & Wright, J. C. (2001). Early childhood television viewing and adolescent behavior: The Recontact Study. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 68, 1143. Anderson, D. R., & Pempek, T. (2005). Television and very young children. American Behavioral Scientist, 48, 505522.
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Barr, R. (2008). Attention to and learning from media during infancy and early childhood. In S. L. Calvert & B. J. Wilson (Eds.), Blackwell handbook of child development and the media (pp. 143165). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Barr, R. (2010). Transfer of learning between 2D and 3D sources during infancy: Informing theory and practice. Developmental Review, 30, 128154 Bronfenbrenner, U. (1995). Developmental ecology: Through space and time a future perspective. In P. Moen, G. H. Elder, & K. Luscher (Eds.), Examining lives in context: Perspectives on the ecology of human development (pp. 619647). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Clark, R. E. (1983). Reconsidering research on learning from media. Review of Educational Research, 53, 445459. Courage, M. L., & Howe, M. L. (2010). To watch or not to watch: Infants and toddlers in a brave new electronic world. Developmental Review, 30, 101115. Dupre, J., & Cartwright, N. (1988). Probability and causality: Why Hume and indeterminism dont mix. Nous, 22, 521536. Goodrich, S. A., Pempek, T. A., & Calvert, C. L. (2009). Formal production features in infant programming. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 163, 11511156. Hedstrom, P., & Ylikoski P. (2010). Causal mechanisms in the social sciences. Annual Review of Sociology, 36, 4967. Kozma, R. (1994). Will media inuence learning: Reframing the debate. Educational Technology Research and Development, 42, 719. Linebarger, D. L., & Vaala, S. E. (2010). Screen media and language development in infants and toddlers: An ecological perspective. Developmental Review, 30, 176202. Linebarger, D. L., & Walker, D. (2005). Infants and toddlers television viewing and language outcomes. American Behavioral Scientist, 48, 624645.

Copyright r 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Inf. Child. Dev. 19: 553556 (2010) DOI: 10.1002/icd