Seminar 12: Presentation Day 2

This week, I presented my topic on 'The Video Deficit Effect'. I must admit that prior to starting the research for my presentation, I was unsure if there was enough data on the topic for a 45 minute presentation. This is because the phenomenon is so new and having only been discovered by Anderson & Pempek in 2005. Once I began my research, I was happily surprised to find that there were several articles that alluded to the Video Deficit, approximately 20. These articles used different research techniques and they all discovered the same effect. I was shocked to learn that this effect had been validated so many times! Initially, I thought that in theory, the Deficit sounded interesting, but I had no idea that there actually existed solid evidence to prove the theory. Even with all these validations, it is still important to realize that the Theory is still in its infancy and needs more research to determine all its intricacies.

In researching the presentation, I was very surprised to find how striking the results are. At the same time, I am shocked to see that none of these results have been transmitted to the general public. It seems that there exists a great disconnect between research findings and their application in general society. This most definitely is one of the biggest problems in research today. I believe that a major change in society needs to occur to permit the utilization of the groundbreaking research. Even my sister who is a physician and my cousin who is a recent pediatrician graduate, had no knowledge of any of the Baby Einstein findings.

I had a lot of fun doing my presentation and I couldn't believe the results that came out from the video vs. live person experiment that I conducted during my presentation. I analyzed the data in SPSS afterwards and put the results below. It seems that there actually is a significant effect of the video deficit, even though the group was significantly older than the group that it had been witnessed in previously. Perhaps this should be looked into and researched further.

Statistics

Video Live Person

N Valid 10 10

Missing 0 0

Mean 4.20 5.70

Std. Error of Mean .611 .616

Median 4.00 6.50

Mode 2a 7

Std. Deviation 1.932 1.947

Variance 3.733 3.789

Skewness .111 -1.846

Std. Error of Skewness .687 .687

Kurtosis -1.751 3.427

Std. Error of Kurtosis 1.334 1.334

Range 5 6

Minimum 2 1

Maximum 7 7

Sum 42 57

a. Multiple modes exist. The smallest value is shown

Video

Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative Percent

Valid 2 3 30.0 30.0 30.0

3 1 10.0 10.0 40.0

4 2 20.0 20.0 60.0

6 3 30.0 30.0 90.0

7 1 10.0 10.0 100.0

Total 10 100.0 100.0

Live Person

Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative Percent

Valid 1 1 10.0 10.0 10.0

4 1 10.0 10.0 20.0

5 1 10.0 10.0 30.0

6 2 20.0 20.0 50.0

7 5 50.0 50.0 100.0

Total 10 100.0 100.0

Seminar 11: Presentation Day 1

I really enjoyed this weeks presentations. I was very impressed by many of the speakers and I am happy to say that I learnt several new things. I especially enjoyed the presentation on the kindergarten school programs. I really didn't know very much about way that kindergartens worked in Canada and I was very surprised to learn about all the different program that are available in other countries and other provinces. I was very surprised to learn that the kindergarten programs in Ontario are quite bad in comparison to other kindergarten programs in Canada and worldwide.

I also enjoyed the Baby Einstein presentation and I felt like I learnt new material even though I did my project on Baby Einstein as well. I enjoyed the interactive activity as it made the class think on their feet and really got everyone involved. I liked how she focused on the specific aspects of one particular video, the Baby Wordsworth as I only researched the original edition for my paper. Her general overview of TV watching was very interesting as well as the specific aspects she mentioned about the pros and cons of Baby Einstein. I found the findings about the coviewing to be very interesting. Although coviewing may in fact increase the infants attentiveness and facilitate learning, I am highly skeptical that this is even possible. Only in very highly controlled environments where researchers force the parents to coview will there even be a chance that they will sit and watch the entire program. It is apparent that from many parent testimonials that their main reason for allowing their baby to watch the program is that it is both educational and an electronic babysitter. Although the latter is definitely true, the educational claims have been debunked several times over. I can only hope that parents will not submit to the claims and instead spend meaningful time with their children instead of forcing them to watch TV.