This study sought to find the proportion of main ideas and subordinate ideas learned by older adults from a television documentary, by measuring their performance on a domain-referenced test based upon the program narration. Also examined were relationships between what was learned and the participant's age, education, and attitude towards television programming. / Participants were 87 adults between 53 and 86 years of age; 30 (35%) were male, and 56 (55%) female. Levels of education and pre-retirement annual household income were above average. / A propositional analysis scheme was used to decompose the narration of a 29-minute documentary into 11 levels of ideas. Recall performance was measured by asking participants to write one, two or three word responses to questions and incomplete statements. Multiple-choice questions measured recognition performance. / Administration took place in Port Charlotte and Tallahassee in Florida. Participants were not informed that they would be given a posttest, nor were they provided with learning directions. Learning was assumed, therefore, to be incidental. / Results from cued-recall test items revealed that participants recalled 56% of the ideas presented. Recognition, as indicated by multiple-choice items, was 53%. A higher percentage of main ideas (60%) was recalled than subordinate ideas (51%); in contrast recognition of subordinate ideas was 56%, and main ideas 51%. / Regression analysis showed that 15% of test-score variance was accounted for by education (10%), age (4%), and attitude (1%). A positive correlation between education and amount learned was observed (p < .05). / The finding that these adults remembered 56% of the program content, when measured by cued-recall, was higher than expected when compared with previous informal observations. The method of content analysis employed in this study, and the domain-referenced testing approach based upon it, are considered to be contributions of value to future research. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 41-10, Section: A, page: 4258. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1980.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74314 |
| Contributors | OWENS, RICHARD DAVID., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 195 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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