Television viewing versus reading: Mental effort, retention, and inferential learning

The study compared children's learning from structurally equivalent television and print versions of two stories. Three hypotheses derived from Salomon's (1984) model were tested: (a) children invest more mental effort in processing print stories compared to television stories; (b) story recall is not affected by the medium through which the story is presented; and (c) print stories lead to more inferential learning than television stories. Fourth and sixth grade students watched the television film version of one story and read the text version of the other story. Mental effort was assessed during television viewing and reading by measuring secondary‐reaction times, and afterwards by means of Salomon's retrospective measure. Story retention and story‐related inferences were measured both immediately following each story and two to three weeks later. As assessed by Salomon's measure, children invested more mental effort in reading than in watching television, but on the reaction‐time measure the reverse was found. Contrary to the prediction, the television stories resulted in more inferential learning than the print stories. On the immediate‐retention tests, the print stories were recalled as well as the television versions, but on the delayed tests, viewers’ retention was superior to that of readers.