"Classification of Educational Radio Research" (January 1, 1941)

( 3 ) The present conten t preferences of students do not seem to offer any very useful information for teachers . Youngsters listen mostly to enter¬ tainment programs. Many teachers would like to have them listen to more news, more forums and more educational broadcasts. These facts confront the teacher with a two-fold problem, namely, to help some students acquire the serious attitudes needed for listening to serious programs and to study the entertain¬ ment programs in order to get some picture of what the satisfactions are that the youngsters certainly get from them. Psychological studies of the motives and satisfactions that young people get from their radio listening are now under way. The effects of the ’ crime-serials’ on youthful listeners are being studied at the Bureau of Research in Education by Radio at the University of Texas. These will surely provide valuable information for teachers anxious to under¬ stand their students. (4) Teachers must know something about the production - preferences of their students. It will not do to recommend regular listening to forums to. students who are interested in and able to pay attention only to dramatizations; nor will the boy who uses the radio to provide fantasy material of the Super¬ man type for himself be likely to learn much from serious science school broad¬ casts. Research on production-preferences for students of different ages and both sexes is needed to supply information on these points to teachers. (5) Teachers will need to know something about the analytical preferences of their students, that is to say, preferences with respect to pro¬ gram elements such as voices, pace, acting, sound effects, etc. It seems probable that many of these preferences are widely different for young people of different ages, but objective findings that would permit rational choices and acceptable recommendations of programs to be made on this basis are not yet available. (6) Mhny teachers are already interested in trying to influence the radio tastes of their students. More insistence or recommendation of programs that teachers consider good, are alike ineffective, but when teachers learn as the result of research of the five types just mentioned what the radio preferences of their students actually are, they will be able to recommend some programs that the students can like. In this way will students learn that the teachers have their interests at heart and that the teachers understand and sympathize with them. It is to be hoped, of course, that as educational pro¬ grams are made to fit the interests of youngsters, the youngsters will gradually change their preferences to include more educational programs. (7) Many educational programs are designed to initiate or stimulate discussion , reading and other activities . It will be necessary to do a great deal of research to find out if those programs are actually effective in these respects. Miss Jeanette Sayre's study of "America’s Town Meeting of the Air found little evidence of this stimulating effect on individual listeners. It is very likely that this program, when used by listening groups and by local town meetings, has a much bigger effect. Research on this point is in progress. A study done by the Evaluation of School Broadcasts group at Ohio State University* with sixth-grade children in the public schools of Cicero, Illinois, showed that the radio could be used to initiate and stimulate a good deal of * - Reported in Miles, J R, "Radio and Elementary Science Teaching," Jnl. of Ap. Psychol. XXIV , 6* Dec. 1940. -8-