The study is seeking to answer four questions relating to finding out whether: children invest more mental effort in reading than watching television, books being perceived to have made higher demands than television, children thinking that are more capable of learning from television than from books, and looking at television and how the perceived self-efficacy is negatively correlated to mental effort. The study was conducted with sixth-graders from five middle-class elementary schools in the Netherlands. To test the amount of invested mental effort, the individuals being tested had a four-point scale to see how hard they try to understand nine books and television programs. Through this, they are utilizing reports of acts. To test perceived self-efficacy individuals used a four-point scale to test how easy it would be for them to learn ten topics from books and television programs. To test perceived demand characteristics individuals were tested in two ways. First, on a five-point scale, they had to report on how lifelike television and books are and how important it is to know who the producer or author is. Second, on a to a four-choice questionnaire, they were asked why a hypothetical child did or did not completely understand a book or television program. The questionnaires were done in each of the subjects classrooms. A result of this study was that unlike the Salomon study they did not find an alpha value for the questions about how real book and television are. An interesting find from this study was that there was a negative correlation when testing the perceived demand characteristics between books and television programs. Overall, since the study is collecting reports of acts, the study could have collected the data through interviews.

Beentjes, Johannes W. J. 1989. “Learning from Television and Books: A Dutch Replication Study Based on Salomon’s Model”. Educational Technology Research and Development. Vol. 37. No. 2. 47-58.