There’s a new study about the worth of educational videos tailored for babies:
“Do Babies Learn From Baby Media?” Judy S. DeLoache, Cynthia Chiong, Kathleen Sherman, Nadia Islam, Mieke Vanderborght, Georgene L. Troseth, Gabrielle A. Strouse and Katherine O’Doherty, Psychological Science, vol. 21, no. 11, November 2010, pp. 2170-4. The authors, who are variously at the University of Virginia and at Vanderbilt University — and who mysteriously do not identify the video — report:
“In recent years, parents in the United States and worldwide have purchased enormous numbers of videos and DVDs designed and marketed for infants, many assuming that their children would benefit from watching them. We examined how many new words 12- to 18-month-old children learned from viewing a popular DVD several times a week for 4 weeks at home. The most important result was that children who viewed the DVD did not learn any more words from their monthlong exposure to it than did a control group…. 
Another important result was that parents who liked the DVD tended to overestimate how much their children had learned from it. We conclude that infants learn relatively little from infant media and that their parents sometimes overestimate what they do learn.”
Judy DeLoache sums up the research, in a brief video. [to watch it, click on the image here].
BONUS: Last year the Improbable Research newspaper column wrote about a study that evaluated whether the DVDs produced for infants have much content. That column drew angry letters (to the Guardian, where the column appeared, and to us) from someone involved with some of those videos.