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Essay on Cognitive Development and Media Exposure
Mass communication research has been rather slow to develop specific theories that explain how people learn. For those theories, we need to turn to cognitive psychology, because it is the field that most directly focuses on the mental operations that lead to learning. Mass communication research, though, has not ignored explanations for learning. Because of our field's emphasis on different issues, mass communication has taken a different approach to understanding learning from the media. The focus on the functions and responsibilities of the media in democratic societies has directed research on how much people learn from news and which medium is better for learning. A concern about the educational impact of television on children has directed research on children's attention to television. Working parallel to cognitive psychology, mass communication researchers made important contributions to understanding how it is that the audience learns media content. (Allen, M., Emmers, T., Gebhardt, L., & Giery, M. A., 1995)
There are two basic approaches to explaining learning: active and passive approaches. The active approach is drawn from cognitive psychology. These theories assume that the audience is active and engages in mental activities that result in learning. Active learning theories fall within two models of media effects: the conditional model or the cognitive -transactional model. The active approach holds that learning occurs because people are motivated to learn and mentally engaged in the acquisition of information. The passive approach finds evidence in mass communication research. This approach assumes that people are either unmotivated or unable to learn, so effective messages must be created to attract attention and instill information, without people realizing it. Because the audience is passive, media producers must take the initiative to create media content that attracts attention and can be easily remembered. So, the main focus of the passive approach is media content variables and they fall under the direct and cumulative effects models.....................
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