Wile E. Coyote, Physical Science Genius: A Content Analysis of Children’s Science Media

• In Event: Poster Session 14
  In Poster Session: PS 14 Topic - Technology, Media & Child Development

Abstract

Children’s understanding of key STEM concepts when they enter kindergarten is predictive of future STEM engagement and success (Dou, Hazari, Dabney, Sonnert, & Sadler, 2019; Siegler et al., 2012), highlighting the importance of early childhood science education. Educators and parents, however, report feeling ill-equipped to teach science (Banilower et al., 2013; Gerde, Pierce, Lee, & Van Egeren, 2018; Silander et al., 2018).

One critical resource that parents and teachers could use to bolster children’s science learning is educational media. To learn more about the type and quality of educational media that children are consuming, we conducted a critical investigation of commercially available children’s media that aim to teach science concepts. We focused specifically on narrative media (e.g., The Magic School Bus), which require children to separate the target educational material (e.g., facts about the solar system) from the aspects of the stories that should not apply to reality (e.g., buses can change into rocketships). Given that much of children’s media, including educational media, contains unrealistic elements (Goldstein & Alperson, 2020), this study aims to provide a comprehensive review of which unrealistic elements are most common in educational science stories and how these elements interact with the target educational material.

To be included in this analysis all pieces of media must: (1) be narrative (that is, present a story or series of events), (2) be specifically designed to teach some aspect of science, and (3) be aimed at children ages 4-10 years. This study included a total of 313 pieces of children’s science media: 154 storybooks and 159 television episodes. Although three prior content analyses have been conducted on children’s science media (Aladé, Lauricella, Kumar, & Wartella, 2020; Bonus & Mares, 2018; Charpentier, 2007), all of these only investigated video-based media; our coding set allows us to compare across media.

Preliminary analyses of 20 books and 113 videos reveals that 93% of children’s science educational media contains at least one fantasy element. The three most common fantasy elements are anthropomorphized animals (58%), cartoon physics (49%) and advanced technology (45%). On average, books contain significantly fewer fantasy elements than videos (Mbooks = 0.65; Mvideos = 2.86; t(38) = -8.79, p<0.001). Further, there are significant differences in the number of fantasy elements in media that aim to teach different science topics, with media that teach physical sciences containing 2.94 elements, media that teach biological science containing 2.39 elements, and media that teach aspects of the process of science containing 1.14 elements, F(2, 129) = 4.66, p= 0.011. Finally, both biological and physical science episodes are significantly more likely to feature a male lead character (69%) than a female lead character (20%) (X2(1, N=112)= 41.37, p < 0.001).

In general, children’s educational television is highly fantastical in nature. Given that children may learn new information more readily from realistic media (Walker, Gopnik, & Ganea, 2015), this study provides a critical first look at how this issue may play out in commercially available media.

Authors

• Natasha Chlebuch, Villanova University
  Presenting Author

• Aarti Bodas, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Villanova University
  Non-Presenting Author