Two years ago, in August 2007, AHP reported the finding that “infants don’t learn language well from instructional videos.” This has since led to legal claims against Walt Disney Corporation and its Baby Einstein DVD product.
Now Disney is offering to refund all purchases made in US, going back five years. This provides an opportunity to look back at our original coverage, which examined the issue from the perspective of parents’ hopes to help their children become as gifted as possible. This also included a detailed bibliography of histories of giftedness. What has happened since?
Most notably, in terms of linking this story to the typical interests of AHP readers, Kathleen Ann Scott (2007) completed a dissertation comparing print and video as educational media for teaching the development of historical thinking. Although her efforts were not directed at infants, the resulting study can be conceived as setting some limits on how much the scepticism regarding the value of instructional videos can be generalized. She concludes: “readers manifested more and deeper historical understandings in their responses than did their counterparts in the movie group.” And she suggests this is as a result of the greater investment of attentional effort in reading as compared to watch television, which seems consistent with the criticisms of the instructional DVDs.
How you found this at 12.52 is beyond me…
I have a daughter, now almost ten years old, who has mild autism (and in case anyone is curious, thimerosal was no longer used in Australian vaccines by the time it came for her to be immunised, so there).
Her language skills were quite low for her age; she was evaluated to be three standard deviations below normal. We got her some of the early “Baby Einstein” DVDs, and it did wonders for her.
So while I wouldn’t show them to an infant, for a preschooler with developmental delay (i.e. outside one or two sigma), these may be useful. As always, this is not medical advice, and you should always consult your child’s paediatrician first.
Shame they aren’t so keen to refund anywhere else
HUh? But what if you read the book once, and watch the show 10 times, as kids might? What if you have an audio and visual memory? I find I still remember stuff I watched on tv or songs I had on audio tape as a kid, so these findings don’t click for me. IT also seems like a bit of a step backwards in this media rich world.
Drunken inspiration. Derren?
I thought it was a well known fact that Albert Einstein’s language barely developed during his infancy?
The reason he was such an advanced thinker was that during a vital stage his brain’s capacity wasn’t taken up by the learning of a language, and instead was turned to problem solving – i.e. his EQ didn’t develop (emotional intelligence) but his IQ was boosted hugely.
So baring this in mind, the Disney DVD does exactly what it says on the tin.
Parents should ask themselves, do they really want to be the mother or father of an ‘einstein baby’ i.e. a socially retarded recluse?
It seems logical that when we read we learn at our own pace timing the information gathering to what suits us best and I mean how many of us have had to re read a sentence , a word or even a page.
Also we have to manually add our own mental images which means surely creativeness and finding our own images we prefer unconsciously to use.
Rather than being spoon fed!