ABSTRACT
This chapter explains children extract and comprehend educational content from television. The capacity model predicts that factors that allow for more efficient processing of either televised narrative or educational content will reduce the demands of processing that type of information. A few theoretical approaches have been proposed to describe aspects of the processing that allows viewers to understand televised narratives but almost no mechanisms have been proposed to explain how children extract and comprehend educational content from television. The processing of narrative and educational content compete for resources in working memory, the scope of the competition depends on the level of the demands that each type of processing places on those resources. The presence of narrative is self-evident in the many educational television programs that employ fictional stories and characters. Lawson and Kirby demonstrated that the skill of managing multiple problem-solving goals in working memory can be taught, suggesting that this ability may increase with age and experience.
