A Study on the Effect of Continuous Television Viewing upon the Development of Creativity

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the effects of the TV program for young children, "What can you wake?", produced by N H K, upon the developments of creativity. The Ss are Kindergaten children (5 years old) divided into 2 groups, one of which views every program once a week for 2 months (Simple viewing group-SV group) and the other which views every program three times a week repeatedly (Repetitive viewing group-RV group). They were selected by the scores in the gnenral comprehension test before the experiment. The creativity test and the general comprehension test were given at 3 experimental sessions, pre-viewing (pre test), after viewing (post test) and after non-viewing (follow-up test). The creativity test consists of the word association, the multivocal figures and the incomplete figures activity test. They are given for the measurement of fluency, originality, flexibility, elaboration, sensibility and imagihation. The major results were as follows. 1. After the continuous viewing, both groups showed significantly improvements of the general complehension scores, and the viewing effects of RV group were higher than SV group (Fig 1). 2. We could not found direct effects of the contiouous TV viewing upon the developments of creativity in spite of the increment of the scores ofl the word association test as a function of the experimental sessions (Table 1). 3. The RV group showed a considerable progress in the originality and flexibility about images of the multivocal figures. As a result, we have a suggestion that the repetitive viewing of a program contributes to the developments of creativity about imagery (Fig 6). 4. There were no significant relationships between the continuos viewing and the developments of creativity about the incomplete figures activity test (Fig 9). The results above were considerded by two variables, which were the contents of TV program and the length of continuous viewing period.