Children's and adults' recall of television versus print news: Is print really better?

Communication researchers commonly believe that print is a more effective medium to convey news information than television because print offers more opportunity to exercise control over the processing of information than television does. The superiority of print news has been supported by a number of media comparison experiments conducted with adults. Most of these studies show that adults remember more from printed news than from the same news presented on television. Recently, however, several media comparison experiments were conducted which investigated children's recall of television and print news. The results of these studies were all diametrically opposed to the results found in experiments with adults. Unlike adults, children were found to remember more from watching television news than from reading the same news presented in print. This article presents an overview of the recent experimental media comparison studies conducted with children. Subsequently, possible explanations for the opposite outcomes obtained with adults and children are discussed.