I shared a very interesting report with you last week, “The Digital World of Young Children: Impact on Emergent Literacy,” funded by the Pearson Foundation. I have appreciated the information documented in this lengthy report. One area that caught my eye was “Sustaining Attention." Sesame Street funded a study to determine if children actually watch television for a long period of time, or do they watch in bursts. In a 2006 study (Prensky, M., Don’t Bother Me Mom - I’m Learning! 2006), Prensky found that children will moderate their attention based on content. “They attend for longer periods to content they can understand than to content they find confusing.” In another major experiment, Prensky discovered more about children’s attention processes. In one room, there was a television and toys. In another room, with the same number of children, there was a television and no toys. The toys, of course, “distracted the children and only watched the show 47% of the time, as opposed to 87 % of the time in the group without toys. However, when the children were tested on how much of the show they remembered and understood, the scores were identical.”

Source: The Digital World of Young Children: Impact on Emergent Literacy-A White Paper. Funded by the Pearson Fondation.