adults who watch television with young children can help highlight crucial scenes and help interpret the action on the screen (Stevenson, 1972). Furthermore, there is evidence that consumer learning programs can be developed to teach kindergartners elaborated notions about commercials, advertising, and persuasive intent (Wackman et al., 1979). Of course, these programs must start with the child's current level of ability and use teaching tools understandable to the child. Appropriate educational materials may help children develop critical viewing skills at earlier ages. Such receivership skills research is currently underway. At this point, it seems likely that appropriate learning materials will be developed to teach children about the medium of television, both its programming and advertising content. Such materials should help children overcome their misunderstandings of television messages. By improving the skills children bring to the viewing situation we may be able to moderate the impact television has on the child. NOTES The argument advanced here does not mean to imply, however, that children are as active when watching television as they are when engaged in athletics or doing other sorts of activities. Activity here is relative. Multidimensional scaling is a statistical technique that looks at how subject's ratings of a variety of variables group together; that is, it seeks to determine underlying dimensions which describe the relationship among a set of variables for a given group of subjects....
