Poster #9 - Should The Cat in The Hat Keep Talking Like That? Educational Correlates of Anthropomorphism in Children’s Science Media

• In Event: Poster Session 11

Abstract

Anthropomorphism is ubiquitous in children’s media – but how does it affect children’s learning? Past research is mixed on whether these kind of unrealistic depictions benefit or harm children’s learning. Several studies have found that the inclusion of anthropomorphic content in media can hurt learning because it encourages children to extend anthropomorphic properties from the media onto real-world entities (Ganea et. al., 2014; Waxman et. al., 2014). However, several other studies have suggested that the inclusion of anthropomorphic content either has no effect or can help with learning because it can evoke positive responses to the narrative and its educational elements (Bonus & Mares, 2018; Conrad et. al., 2021; Ganea et. al., 2011). One possible explanation for the mixed findings is that differing levels of anthropomorphism can have different effects. Some media used in these studies that contain high degrees of anthropomorphism, essentially depicting nonhuman characters as humans (e.g., the Berenstain Bears; Waxman et. al., 2014), while other researchers used media that contained lesser degrees of anthropomorphism (e.g., Geerdts et. al., 2016). To address this issue, this study conducted a content analysis of anthropomorphism in children’s educational media. Our main goal was to determine if the degree of anthropomorphism present in a piece of media was related to features that indicated its potential educational quality. The media set that we used for our analysis was drawn from a previous study (Chlebuch et. al., 2021) which contained 138 videos (across 33 shows) and 110 books. All media were a) in a narrative format, b) designed to teach a topic in the natural or social sciences, and c) aimed at children between the ages of 4 and 10. Of that set, we used 43 books and 103 videos (across 27 shows) that were identified as having some form of anthropomorphism. Aside from identifying which pieces of media contained anthropomorphism, this project also examined them in a more fine-grained way. One team of coders was asked to analyze what type of entities being anthropomorphized (e.g., animals, objects) and how they were being anthropomorphized (e.g., can talk, wear clothes). Another team of coders analyzed two aspects of educational quality across the books and videos in our set: how explicitly the educational content was stated and the extent to which the educational content was present throughout the story (Jordan, 1996). We found significant evidence indicating a positive relationship between the degree of anthropomorphism present and the explicitness of the educational content. However, we did not find any evidence of a relationship between anthropomorphism and the presence of the educational content. These results suggest that the conflicting findings in the literature may be the result of the different ways in which anthropomorphic content and educational material are incorporated into different stories. Future work will build on these results to empirically clarify the effect that anthropomorphism in media has on children’s learning of the intended educational material.

Authors

• Gabriel Nguyentran, University of California - Merced
  Presenting Author

• Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Villanova University