A three-year study of Whittle Communications’ Channel One project has concluded most teachers and principals give it good grades, that it gives most students small but important advantages in learning and that, overall, it “must be viewed positively.”
Whittle had commissioned a team from the University of Michigan to study the effectiveness of its Channel One advertiser-sponsored television programs in the schools.
Among other findings of the $500,000 study:
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– Students who viewed Channel One learned, on the average, between 5 and 8 percent more information on topics covered in the newscasts during the time the study covered.
“There was a small but consistent advantage to viewing in each testing week,” said Jerome Johnston, principal investigator.
– Over a three-month period, middle school students who viewed Channel One did about 7 percent better, and high school students did 5 percent better than non-viewers on two current events tests. The results varied widely between schools.
– Two-thirds of the teachers surveyed said they would strongly recommend the broadcast to other teachers. About three-fourths of those surveyed said commercials were a fair trade-off for the news and other programming and video equipment provided as part of Channel One.
– If they were grading Channel One, teachers said they would give it an average grade of between A-minus and B-plus.
“For five years, we’ve had to listen to the critics lambaste this program for being shallow in content; for not having any educational merit,” said Jim Ritts, president of network affairs for the Whittle Educational Network. “This report should silence them once and for all.”
A preliminary report, released two years ago, showed that on the average, the advantage for Channel One students was small-only about 3 percent better. But the results varied widely from school to school, depending on whether teachers helped students understand what they saw on the news programs.
After those initial findings, Whittle officials retooled the news program to provide more news, present it better and make it more interesting, said Ritts.
Other findings were that students who already made better grades learned more from Channel One and that students in schools where current affairs was considered an important part of the curriculum fared better as well.
Channel One is offered in 12,000 schools to a potential audience of 8 million students. The program recently went through its first round of renewals on three-year contracts, and the renewal rate was 99.6 percent, said Ritts. Whittle has a waiting list of about 250 schools.
The network is operating profitably and is slightly above projections in amortizing the $300 million investment in the project, Ritts said.