Evaluating Preschoolers’ Comprehension of Educational Television: The Role of Viewer Characteristics, Stimuli Features, and Contextual Expectations

This study represents the first experimental investigation to simultaneously evaluate the impact of three key areas of a child’s television viewing experience -individual differences (story schema), the stimulus (narrative type), and the environment (perceived demand characteristics). Guided by the capacity model (Fisch, 2000, 2004), preschoolers’ comprehension of an educational television program was evaluated in a 2 (story schema: low, high) x 2 (perceived demand characteristics: fun (low), learning (high)) x 2 (narrative type: participatory cues absent, participatory cues present) between-subjects fully crossed factorial experiment. Comprehension was operationalized as both narrative (i.e. central, incidental, and inferential comprehension) and educational content comprehension. A total of 172 preschoolers (102 females) participated in the study (Mean Age = 4.2 years). Children were randomly assigned to one of four conditions created by crossing the perceived demand characteristic manipulation with the narrative type manipulation. Story schema level was assigned through a median-split procedure based on story schema scores. In addition to program comprehension, data was collected on expressive vocabulary, story schema skills, program familiarity, and engagement with and attention to stimuli. Advanced story schema supported narrative comprehension, and this reduction in narrative processing demands translated to educational content comprehension. Children’s television programmers are advised to design educational television content which conforms to a prototypical story structure while integrating educational content within the narrative. Additionally, while children seemed able to devote greater attention to content when asked to “watch to learn”, they appeared to struggle with how to differentially distribute this attention, resulting in minimally enhanced inferential processing and no additional benefits to educational content comprehension. Finally, the inclusion of participatory cues in children’s television programming was not sufficient to support comprehension. Rather, it seems that engagement with participatory cues is necessary to support comprehension – particularly for children with low story schema and children viewing “for fun”. When integrating the findings for perceived demand characteristics and narrative type, children’s television programmers are advised to use participatory cues strategically to highlight educational content

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Which Came First? Assessing Transactional Relationships Between Children’s Violent Media Use and ADHD-Related Behaviors

© 2018, The Author(s) 2018. This longitudinal study investigated transactional relationships between violent media use and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)–related behaviors among young children (ages 4-8 years). To investigate study hypotheses, we employed a random intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) using structural equation modeling with panel data from 890 children. Results provided evidence in support of a media selection process rather than media effects process, whereby an increase in a child’s ADHD-related behaviors predicted an increase in the child’s violent media use 1 year later. Results indicated that this longitudinal relationship was accounted for by within-child fluctuations over time rather than stable between-child differences. The findings highlight the importance of investigating transactional relationships as well as distinguishing between-person and within-person relationships.status: publishe

Screen Media Use and ADHD-Related Behaviors in Children and Adolescents: Four Decades of Research

status: publishe

Development of the Adolescent Measure of Empathy and Sympathy (AMES)

The aim of the present study was to develop and validate a new instrument to measure empathy and sympathy in adolescents that differentiates between empathy and sympathy, and balances its emphasis on affective and cognitive empathy. The psychometric properties of the Adolescent Measure of Empathy and Sympathy (AMES) were established in two studies. In the first study, among 499 adolescents (10-15. years old), the structure of the AMES was investigated and the number of items was reduced. In the second study, among 450 adolescents, test-retest reliability and construct validity of the AMES was evaluated. Results indicate that the AMES met the standards of reliability and validity. By specifically distinguishing between affective empathy and sympathy, the AMES provides a distinct advantage over existing measurement tools and is useful in elucidating the relationship between empathy and behavior in adolescents