4.2 Research Beginnings

We trace the beginning of research on media and learning back to the 1930s and the Payne Fund studies, the first large-scale attempt to investigate the media's role in influencing people's beliefs and attitudes about society, other people, and themselves. These studies were designed to assess film content, identify audience size and composition, and examine effects resulting from exposure to the medium.

The Payne Fund studies explored many of the ideas later popularized by other writers in regard to the, three types of learning that have become dominant in studies of media and learning: (1) knowledge acquisition or the reception and retention of specific information; (2) behavioral performance, defined as the imitation or repetition of actions performed by others in media portrayals; and (3) socialization or general knowledge, referring to attitudes about the world fostered by repeated exposure to mass media content.

Four studies that emerged from the Payne Fund research are of particular importance in regard to media and learning; each made fundamental arguments that would reappear in various forms and motivate later research. The first (Holaday & Stoddard, 1933) viewed learning from the knowledge acquisition perspective in an examination of both adults and children. After testing for the ability to retain film content accurately, the authors concluded, that respondents acquired considerable general information from movie viewing, particularly in the areas of English, history, and geography. These findings strongly suggested that movies could revolutionize the means by which traditional academic subjects could be taught in the classroom. The Payne Fund studies also introduced the notion of learning from media as part of a socialization process. Researchers examined the ways in which attitudes among children could be changed by exposure to movies (Peterson & Thurstone, 1933). Topics addressed in the study included such issues as nationality, race, prohibition, war, and the punishment of criminals. The authors were particularly interested in the cumulative effects of films, that is, whether viewers of numerous movies were affected to a stronger degree than light viewers--a question that would inspire a multitude of studies on television's effects many years later. The results of the study concluded that "motion pictures have definite, lasting effects on the social attitudes of children" (Peterson & Thurstone, 1933, p. 66).

Taking the cumulative effects concept a step further, another study investigated the net effect of all film exposure on children's attitudes and behavior (Shuttleworth & May, 1933). Although the authors challenged Peterson's and Thurstone's conclusions regarding specific effects, they confirmed the general finding that movies reinforced existing behavior patterns and types of attitudes among those children who frequently attended movies. In other words, although the researchers accepted the notion that learning occurred while viewing movies, they recognized that learning from a mass medium could occur in different ways among different audiences, despite the uniform nature of the message.

A final example from the Payne Fund studies also dismissed the notions of powerful, aggregate film effects, arguing that a variety of mediating factors--situational, social background, and personality--should be taken into account when assessing learning from film (Cressey, 1934). Nevertheless, the study supported film's potential as an informal learning instrument, particularly in areas associated with social deviance:

... when a child or youth goes to the movies he acquires from the experience much more than entertainment. General information concerning realms of life of which the individual does not have other knowledge, specific information and suggestions concerning fields of immediate personal interest, techniques of crime, methods of avoiding detection, and of escape from the law, as well as countless techniques for gaining special favors and for interesting the opposite sex in oneself are among the educational contributions of entertainment films" (Cressey, 1934, p. 506).

This study concluded by arguing that film's ability to educate was the result of the combination of important inherent qualities in the medium: wide variation in content, gripping narrative techniques, and appeal to "basic human motives and wishes." Compared to traditional classroom teaching, Cressey asserted, films offered an irresistible--and oppositional--new source of knowledge, especially for young people.

The Payne Fund studies represent one of the earliest and most important systematic investigations of the direct-effects model. This model was defined in simple, straightforward terms in the classic question: Who says what to whom with what effect? (Lasswell, 1948). However, though the direct, or magic-bullet, theory was the approach adopted in most of the Payne Fund studies, investigators like Shuttleworth, May, and Cressey proposed that more was at work when children viewed, read, or listened to mass media than direct-content effects. The Payne Fund studies explored the major concepts, research questions, and issues that would characterize studies of media and learning for the next 60 years. Unfortunately, later researchers opted for simpler models and explanations of learning outcomes resulting from media experiences.

Most subsequent research adopted the notion of a linear communication model based on Lasswell's 1948 question. According to this approach, the critical elements of communication thus were sender, message, receiver, and effect. The communication process began when a particular source with a specific intent initiated communication in order to achieve the desired effect. Research following this line of thinking adopted strong emphasis on the sender and the sender's intent in relation to the content of the message and its impact on the receiver.

A linear and sequential orientation to the study of communication outcomes became clear in early research and exerted strong influence on the evolution of subsequent research. The advantage of the model was that each of the elements of the model outlining the communication process could be focused on in relative isolation from the other components. Each communication had a clear beginning and end and followed the same sequence beginning with the sender's initiation of the message.

The disadvantage was that the model had severe limitations for adequately describing the components of the communication process, their interrelationships, and the role of other factors in influencing communication. Over time, researchers adopted more complex models that attempted to do so. The importance of a wide array of mediating factors gradually became clear. However, the basic linear structure, as well as the characterization of communication as a series of sequential steps, remained. The argument here proposes that future research on media and learning adopt a conceptualization of communication as an integrated process that cannot be broken out into sequential components in a linear fashion and that is more compatible with learning theory. Rather than conducting research that focuses on an individual component and its related factors, we have adopted a model that assumes the need for an integrated understanding of the dynamics and interrelationships among the components and factors.

If a metaphor for the previous model is the spotlight that focuses in on one or another component of the process, our model would adopt, instead, the metaphor of a light spectrum for understanding learning and media. The light spectrum is defined as "the series of colored bands diffracted through a prism or other diffracting medium and shading continuously from red ... to violet. . . with invisible components at both ends" (Webster's New World Dictionary, 1966, p. 1400). Just as white light may be conceived as the presence of many different elements of light, visible or invisible, media experiences may be conceived as the presence of many different components and factors (internal and external). The mediating factors in the process of communication diffract, absorb, reflect, or filter what individuals take from their experiences. Communication passes through filters related to the production of the message, the symbol system and codes of the medium, the context in which the communication occurs, and the unique cognitive filters (beliefs, attitudes, experience, and so on) of individual learners. Thus, our understanding of mediated learning should account not only for different types of filtration mechanisms but should also realize the range of possibilities that arise from this process; that is, learning should be defined not as a narrow set of outcomes but rather as a diverse range of possibilities.

Since the introduction of electronic mass media in the 1920s and 1930s, the history of research on media and audiences may be understood as a series of inquiries adopting different emphases. Some research orientations focused on the technical aspects of media, others on the individual listener or viewer, and still others on an examination of media's role in shaping, reinforcing, or changing social relations. The theories and models that represent their major tenets can be loosely grouped under three philosophical perspectives: A technical perspective highlights the medium itself; a psychological perspective examines the ways in which individual viewers process messages from various sources; a social-cultural perspective examines how social relationships define media, determines how they are used, identifies audience expectations of media, and influences the way messages are interpreted. Each of these general perspectives will be discussed in terms of a definition of the orientation, an overview of the communication elements, an explanation of research assumptions, and a discussion of representative research traditions.