The effects of model age and model sex on the psychological modeling of selected college women

Abstract

This investigation was conducted to determine whether the age and sex of mediated teacher-models affect the knowledge acquisition and the attitudinal preferences of female undergraduate elementary education students. The subjects were 146 college women between 17 and 25 years of age. All randomly attended one of six instructional slide-audio presentations which were identical in content, but differed in the use of the teacher-models demonstrating teaching techniques with children in an elementary school classroom. A 3 X 2 factorial design (model age by model sex) was employed in the experiment. The six treatments included both male and female models from three different age ranges: (1) young (20-25 years), (2) middle-aged (40-45 years), and (3) pre-retirement-aged (60-65 years). Immediately following each of the six treatments, the subjects responded to two instruments. The first instrument was a 5-point attitude scale consisting of 7 items which measured the students' attitudes toward the overall merit of the presentation and toward the effectiveness of the pictured model. The second instrument was a 22- item multiple choice examination based on the informational content of the media presentation.