For the second year in a row, the iPad is the most popular item that children are asking for as a holiday gift.  Given that it is the season for making wish-lists, it is in this spirit that I offer my own iPad research wish-list for 2012. The items on this list will surely keep a variety of researchers busy in the new year and would help address some critical questions about the iPad in particular, but touch screens in general. Given that there are 8 days of Chanukah & 12 days of Christmas, I offer 10 items with a standard deviation of 2 (as a compromise) on my work related wish-list.

1)     I wish we had better data on whether using touch screen supports spatial relations and other cognitive functions as we’ve learned that other videogames can sometimes do. Does it really matter if a child is using a joystick or a finger to do a particular task?  Do joystick maneuvers help develop skills finger sliding doesn’t or just different skills? It’s clear from our research that children have a much easier time manipulating items on a touch-screen than a mouse. Is a touch screen like driving an automatic and a computer mouse more of a stick shift?

2)     I wish I knew more about what activities touch screen experiences are displacing and whether those alternative experiences are generally more enriching than what children do on touchscreens. One of the early arguments against television was that time with TV displaced other creative or educational activities in the home that would be better for learning. The actual research suggests that not to generally be the case when it comes to educational television viewing. That is, those who experience educational television are also more likely to be engaged in other educational experiences such as reading. Might the same thing be true for touchscreen use?

3)     I wish I knew how to increase interactions between parents and children around touchscreen technologies. From our own observations and conversations with experts in the field, it is clear that we could do more to increase conversations around games and e-books, but the actual implementation of how we do that is still a bit hazy. Is there any experimental data on this?

4)     I wish somebody would fund some research around touch screen technologies ability to improve executive functioning. Do children persist more around games/tasks that are on the iPad or other touch screen technology compared to computers because they are new and different? What about compared to real life games? If there is a difference now, will that change as touch screens become more commonplace and less “cool?”

5)     I wish I knew whether or not we could legitimately use interactive technologies, mobile technologies, and touch screen technologies interchangeably when we’re talking about the influence of interactive technology on children’s learning. Does the medium matter for learning assuming the general content is the same? Does the size of the screen matter?

6)     I wish someone could send me an empirically based research summary of best practices on the technical features (or formal features) of e-books and digital games. For example, when using an art-tool in an iPad games for 3 year olds, should there be auto-fill feature when a child fills in 75% of the item that the whole item becomes filled in? Should it automatically fill-in before that? Not fill in at all? Would filling it in reduce frustration? Or would it be rewarding a child for non-completion?

7)     I wish I could confidently answer my sister when she asks whether doing art or something else exploratory or freestyle, is just as effective for motor development and creativity as it would be drawing with real crayons and paper and finger painting.

8)     I wish there were more research studies around the use of iPads or other individualized portable devices to help individualize experiences that are tailored to a child’s readiness level during the preschool years. Would this practice have promising effects even for the youngest children? And what about technology portability nature makes the iPad or other touchscreens particularly useful for assessment?

9)     I wish there wasn’t a digital divide and I wish more people had access to the wonderful opportunities touch screen devices may afford. This assumes, of course, that these touch screen devices do all sorts of great things for the world. Good content can provide a whole host of cognitive and social benefits (what did I do before bejeweled came into my life?) but there’s not enough empirical evidence about the effectiveness of new touch screens on learning.

10)  And finally, I wish I could be even half as skilled as my niece (7) and nephew (4) on “Cut the Rope.”

Happy Holidays to all of you!

Jennifer Kotler is the Vice President of Domestic Research at Sesame Workshop. She holds a PhD in Child Development from the University of Texas at Austin.

Learning apps for mobile devices have been a hot topic in educational technology for some time — but most developers haven’t been able to back their claims of educational value for students. Until now: Our friends at Motion Math, Jacob Klein and Gabriel Adauto, have just announced the results of a recent study evaluating students’ engagement with their iPad app. Learn more about the study and what the researchers found.

How does one know that an educational experience is actually helping students learn? Our company Motion Math makes educations games for the iPad and iPhone that let kids play with numbers. It’s easy for us to think, as we’re making our apps, and watching students play them, to believe that learning is happening, especially because we spend a lot of time ensuring that our designs follow good pedagogical and usability principles. However, the history of educational technology is littered with many false promises and disappointing results, most recently given an overview by Matt Richtel of The New York Times. For these reasons, and for our own self-understanding, it’s important that we sometimes hold our learning technologies up to scientific scrutiny.

That’s why we decided to put one of our apps, a fractions estimation game for the iPad, to the test. To our knowledge this is the first ever experiment to measure the learning impact of an iPad app. Using a grant from the Noyce Foundation we commissioned Professor Michelle Riconscente, an expert in educational technology and assessment at USC, to study if our game Motion Math HD achieved two main goals: to help children master estimation of fractions on the number line, and to give students a more positive attitude toward learning fractions. Some of the design choices that ensured the study’s rigor:

• All the test items measuring fractions proficiency were taken from the California Standards Test (CST), the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). In other words, the questions were not specially crafted to artificially produce a positive effect.
• We hired an independent third party to conduct the research.
• The report describes its methods, participants, data, outcomes, and interpretations.
• The experiment included a control group of similar students from the same schools.

The game research organization GameDesk has recently published the results of Riconscente’s study of 122 5th graders. The main findings:

• Students who played Motion Math for 20 minutes for five days improved on a fractions test by an average of 15%.
• Students’ attitudes towards fractions improved 10%.
• Virtually all students rated the game as fun and believed that it helped them learn.

This is a very encouraging result that our approach to engaged, interactive learning works. The full report includes an overview of how difficult it is for students to learn fractions, a description of the study’s design, some helpful critiques of our game’s design, and recommendations for learning app producers and researchers.

A few early reviewers have suggested to us that this study is overkill. Well, certainly not every kid’s app can afford the time and money it takes for a formal assessment. When designing an app, there are hundreds of design decisions to make, and the majority can’t be guided by rigorous experimental data. A designer needs to follow his or her intuition, listen to experts, read the learning literature, discern the elements of good design, and do user-testing to watch and see if students seem to be learning.

The problem is that without introducing the scientific method, using hard data of assessment, there’s no way for our design guidelines to evolve. Many of our assumptions about education (and especially about a new educational technology such as the iPad) are almost certainly wrong, and lead to the creation of bad learning products that don’t make children wiser or smarter. They only waste their time. So if we rely only on the unsystematic or dispersed observations of teachers or experts, we’ll have some input, but we won’t really know. Controlled experiments are an important method to move educational product design forward.

We’re hoping that this study kicks off a conversation — please comment below.

• What should the standards of evidence be for learning apps?
• What do you think about the study?
• How can we speed up and bring down the cost of rigorous assessment?
• How can parents and teachers be confident that a learning app actually helps children learn?

Jacob Klein and Gabriel Adauto are co-founders of Motion Math, the makers of award-winning learning games that let kids play with numbers, and a Cooney Center Mobile Innovation Prize finalist. Their most recent game Motion Math: Hungry Fish teaches mental addition and subtraction with a fish who eats numbers. It’s available for free for iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch.

Deborah Fields at the Networked Participation Workshop, November 11, 2011. Photo by Lori Takeuchi.

It has been a whirlwind few months for me as I have finished my dissertation, begun my fellowship at the Cooney Center, and, now, am writing my first blog post!  One of the big events for me as a Cooney Center fellow so far was attending the JGCC’s “Networked Participation Workshop”, which was funded by the MacArthur Foundation and Cisco Systems. The workshop brought together two dozen representatives from academia and industry who met at Cicso’s New York offices on November 11, 2011 to discuss what is known and what needs to be known about children’s social networking practices online.  By children, the group meant kids between the ages of five and twelve.

The day’s discussions were focused around three main topics:

• Children’s meaningful engagement with online social media (the structures, affordances, and dynamics of the sites where children participate)
• The equity of children’s participation (the contexts and conditions under which various forms of participation do and should take place)
• The risks and benefits of children’s participation (the cognitive, emotional, social, and physical impacts of children’s various forms of participation)

Not having previously studied children’s learning from the angle of digital media, I learned a ton from the workshop!  The takeaway that resonated the loudest and clearest for me was the need to know so much more about kids’ use of online social media, particularly how younger children use apps and tools as well as how that usage might impact their learning—both positively or negatively.

Along these lines, the assembled presenters and discussants articulated a set of key priorities for future research in this area.  Below are just a few of the most powerful points related to our discussion.

(1)   Children’s online “social networking” takes place regularly in sites beyond Facebook and MySpace, and involves activities beyond tweeting, “liking,” and posting on friends’ walls.

Kids’ social networking occurs in virtual worlds, interest-driven affinity spaces, and massively multi-player online games, and it takes many forms, including activities like creating or remixing projects on Scratch, determining the cause of a Whypox outbreak in Whyville, or decorating an avatar’s “igloo” in Club Penguin.  The various sites and spaces in which children participate have many different structures and interactive features, but they share some important aspects in common such as member profiles and visible connections among members. The tendency within prior research to limit consideration of kids’ online social networking only to sites like Facebook and MySpace and to focus on youth older than 13 (these sites only allow members who are at least 13 years old) has resulted in a gross underestimation of how and how much kids participate in social networking activities. Thus it’s particularly important for researchers working in this area to develop appropriate terminology, typologies, and operational definitions to understand the similarities and differences among online sites and to capture and address the full range of children’s participation within them.

(2) Technology is changing rapidly, yet the developmental needs and abilities of children remain the same.

Social networking certainly did not begin with the birth of the Internet.  Developmental psychologist Sandra Calvert (Georgetown University) reminded us that we should use what we know about child development as a framework for analyzing the risks and benefits of kids’ online interactions. This framing can also serve as a guide for informing the design of future social spaces for kids online.

Such a developmental approach can also inform how we examine the specific features of sites and understand how these facilitate certain forms of interaction that may be aiding or impeding kids’ learning.  Research by attendee Sandra Okita (Teachers College, Columbia University), for example, explores the ways that children and adolescents across various developmental stages respond to things like robots and virtual avatars.  She then applies that knowledge to the design of new video games, virtual realities, and other technologies to further test developmental boundaries.

With thousands of years’ worth of accumulated knowledge about human development, it’s good to remind ourselves that the study of children’s virtual lives should be in tandem with the study of children’s off-line lives.

(3) Some of the most valuable learning opportunities for kids online may include practices that are often not currently valued, and in some cases not even allowed.

In a discussion of equity, UC Berkeley graduate student Christo Sims cautioned against the tendency to approach kids’ online participation in terms of a gap or deficiency model that identifies certain online practices as valuable and beneficial. By definition, those who are not engaging in these behaviors are deemed lacking, or in some cases deviant. Such an approach tends to define the “good” according to what the most privileged kids are doing (i.e., middle- and upper-class boys), which not only overlooks creative alternatives by non-majority kids, but normalizes a small subset of behaviors that can become reified in funding and policy arenas.

One common practice that may be currently undervalued, for example, is friending in online social network spaces.  On its face, the practice of accumulating a large number of online connections may seem useless at best and harmful at worst.  However, work by Christine Greenhow (University of Maryland) and others has shown that being part of online social networks builds kids’ social capital, which in-turn is associated with a higher tendency to do well in school, graduate high school, and attend college.

What is more, some practices considered deviant or non-conformist may also have benefits for kids.  Sara Grimes (University of Toronto) and Deborah Fields (University of Pennsylvania) explained that many forms of rule-breaking in online social space-like developing cheats or workarounds and codehacking-not only require a deep knowledge but also help kids build new knowledge. Even more interesting, a 2007 report from the National School Board Association found that kids who engage in these types of alternative practices tend to have higher-than-average leadership and 21st century skills. These kids also participate more frequently in content creation activities, and are generally closer to their parents and peers though their grades in school tend to be lower than those of their peers.  Clearly, the simplistic valuation of kids’ practices in online social networks is inaccurate and potentially misleading.  Rather, we need to approach future investigations of the risks and benefits of kids’ networking practices in a more nuanced way.

Finally, attending this workshop reaffirmed for me what an exciting time it is to be a researcher in the field of digital media and learning! There is no shortage of possible avenues of study that can have real impact on children’s lives. Expect much more from the Cooney Center on the topic of kids’ online social behavior, including a full report on this topic by Sara Grimes and Deborah Fields due out in Spring 2012.

Photo: Deborah Fields (University of Pennsylvania) at the Networked Participation Workshop, November 11, 2011. Photo by Lori Takeuchi.

It has been a whirlwind few months for me as I have finished my dissertation, begun my fellowship at the Cooney Center, and, now, am writing my first blog post!  One of the big events for me as a Cooney Center fellow so far was attending the JGCC’s “Networked Participation Workshop”, which was funded by the MacArthur Foundation and Cisco Systems. The workshop brought together two dozen representatives from academia and industry who met at Cicso’s New York offices on November 11, 2011 to discuss what is known and what needs to be known about children’s social networking practices online.  By children, the group meant kids between the ages of five and twelve.

(more…)

The developer’s prize for the first National STEM Video Game Challenge went to Filament Games, headed by Dan White and Dan Norton, for You Make Me Sick, a game in which students design a bacteria or virus and attempt to infect a target host. Creative Director Dan Norton writes in with an update and shares some tips for aspiring game designers interested in entering this year’s National STEM Video Game Challenge.

Hi everyone! I’m Dan Norton, Creative Director at Filament Games. We were asked by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center to give an update on what’s been cooking in the Filament kitchen since last year’s amazing National STEM Video Game Challenge. Cue the delicate tinkle of a harp as we fade into the past…

Why look! There’s young Dan White, CEO of Filament! He looks so vital and fresh… He’s at a computer, shouting loudly with excitement. What’s happened? Oh yes! Of course—the Filament Web Store has been launched. Filament’s JGC award-winning game You Make Me Sick, along with two other science games—Crazy Plant Shop and Cell Command—are unleashed on an unsuspecting public. Licenses for individuals, teachers, parents and schools are all available. For Filament, this is a *big deal*— it’s the first step to branch out from client-driven work into independent product development and sales. But wait, that darn harp is kicking in again…

Here we see Dan Norton, Creative Director of Filament. He’s in a conference room, holding his head in such a way as to suggest that if he didn’t grip it tightly, it would explode. One thin wall away, construction contractors are running drills, saws, and some kind of device that Dan will never see, but sounds like a saw made out of drills. It’s unpleasant to be sure, but it will all be worth it when Filament more than doubles its studio floorplan, expanding to accommodate our new staff. Filament is now up to four development teams, and has beefed up internal capabilities for sound, research and Quality Assurance.

In all seriousness, it’s been a banner year for our organization, and we’re very grateful to the Cooney Center for their support. With our new team members, new games, and new space we’re looking forward to spreading our mission of “great games with great learning” across the globe. Stay tuned!

This article originally appeared in the Harvard Family Research Project’s December issue of the FINE: Family Involvement Network of Educators newsletter.

Lori Takeuchi, Director of Research for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and author of the recent report Families Matter: Engaging Families in a Digital Age, discusses her research on how children use technology across the various settings of their lives, and the implications of her findings for practitioners who work with young children and their families.

Children today are surrounded by digital media. Households with kids aged 4–14 own, on average, 11 consumer electronic devices,  which suggests that children are spending a good chunk of their waking hours texting friends, playing video games, grooving to their iPods, and hanging out on websites like Poptropica and Webkinz. My recent report, Families Matter: Engaging Families in a Digital Age, chronicles how digital media are shaping childhood, parenting, and family life with a national survey of parents of 3–10-year-olds, as well as in-depth case studies of two young Latina girls and their families.

I wrote Families Matter with the Cooney Center’s typical audiences in mind—namely, producers and researchers of digital media for young children—and so the recommendations posed at the end of the report suggest new design principles and avenues for future investigation. However, the survey results also have implications for practitioners who work with young children and their families, and I would like to share the most relevant parent survey findings for those audiences here.

Parent perceptions

• Not all digital media are created equal in parents’ eyes.
  Parents rate computer-based activities as most valuable for young children’s learning, and a majority also thinks video games, specifically, develop skills important to school success. Mobile phones, meanwhile, are viewed as least valuable for learning, and this device is the one most prohibited by parents for young children’s use; handheld gaming consoles and MP3 players are much more accepted.
• Parents worry about digital media interfering with children’s healthy development…
  Fifty-nine percent of parents believe that digital media prevent children from getting physical exercise, while 53% are concerned about their children’s online safety and privacy. And 40% believe that digital media activities infringe on time that would otherwise be spent in face-to-face interactions.
• … Yet most parents don’t believe their own kids are at risk.
  Only 18% of parents report that their own children spend too much time with technology. Why the apparent paradox? Parents may be unaware of just how much media their kids are consuming. Laptops, MP3 players, and handheld gaming devices tend to be used in the outer reaches of the home, and are not typically positioned the way TV sets are, in a family or living room where parents can see when and what their children are watching, and for how long.
• Parents’ restriction of their kids’ media use tends to be on a case-by-case basis..
  The multiplicity of new technology platforms and the rate at which they change may explain why two-thirds of parents don’t impose a uniform set of rules—they find it either unnecessary or simply impossible. However, 22% percent of parents say they do have strict rules around what their kids can do with home-based media (e.g., television, home computers, video games, mobile devices), and 8% say they have rules but don’t always strongly enforce them. Only 7% of parents claim to have no rules.

Digital media and learning

Too often, we tune into the immediate interactions between a child and digital media platform, and pay less attention to the institutional (e.g., school), economic (e.g., parent work schedules and income), and cultural (e.g., values and norms) factors that invariably shape these interactions. But the case studies featured in Families Matter provide compelling examples of how powerfully these other factors can shape the relationships children have with media and, consequently, can shape their opportunities to learn.

For practitioners interested in how to best integrate new technologies into teaching, programming, and other activities, here are a few recommendations that keep the full range of the child’s learning environment in mind:

• Map digital platforms to children’s developmental needs.
  Children today have access to a wide array of media platforms. However, many were originally designed for adult use. When selecting media for children, make sure they support children’s developing cognitive, social, and, now, motor and visual capacities given the availability of gesture-based (e.g., Wii and Kinect) and 3D gaming systems (Nintendo 3DS).
• Design experiences that require family members and friends to play together.
  Digital media are often blamed for displacing the time kids spend in face-to-face conversation. To address this, use technology to engage children in socializing, outdoor exercise, academic pursuits, and imaginative play—the very activities that parents fear digital media are supplanting from children’s lives.
• Encourage anytime, anywhere learning.
  Mobile devices can enhance networked play and learning by allowing kids to take the necessary hardware outside and from home to school to grandma’s house to continue learning experiences, no matter the location.
• Make screen time family time.
  Adolescents use digital media to express identities separate from their families and connect more closely with peers, but as seen in Gabriela and Sierra’s cases—the two case studies contained in the Families Matter report—younger children tend to enjoy spending more time with their parents. Practitioners should create digital tools and content that leverage this mutual desire for connection, inserting opportunities for learning to occur during play.

Family members communicate, learn, and play together differently than they did 20 years ago, and parents raise their kids differently than their parents raised them. What’s different today from media revolutions of the past is that newer technologies (e.g., iPods, texting, YouTube, Facebook), are being widely adopted by consumers within years, and even months, of their release—compared with the telephone, radio, and television, each of which took decades to become mainstream. The case studies in Families Matters reveal enduring patterns of how families adopt and adjust to new technologies, and how new media wriggle their way into kids’ lives, challenge family values, disrupt well-worn routines, and subsequently inspire parental angst, rule setting, and eventual acclimation. New platforms will come, some will stay, and many will go, but these patterns of integration will retain their currency for quite some time.

Marilyn Jager Adams’s report, “Technology for Developing Children’s Language and Literacy: Bringing Speech Recognition to the Classroom,” was released this fall by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. This commentary was recently published by Education Week.

As everyone who follows such things knows, U.S. students, as a group, do not read very well. Yet, if you are among those who have read about this-indeed, if you are among those who are reading this Commentary, then you (and most of your friends, neighbors, relatives, and colleagues) are very likely a member of that subset of Americans I would term the “hyper-educated.”

By “hyper-educated,” I do not mean extraordinarily highly educated, though many are. By “hyper-educated,” I mean that you accept that becoming educated is part of the fabric of life; you never questioned that your children would be educated, and you raised them accordingly from the start. In fact, most of the children of hyper-educated Americans read quite well; that is good. Not so good, however, is a resulting tendency for too many of the hyper-educated to think of children with reading difficulties as the exception.

To the contrary, among U.S. students, it is good readers who are the exception. As documented yet again by the recently released National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, report on reading for 2011, only one in three U.S. students is able to read and understand grade-level material. Still worse, this statistic holds across school grades and has barely budged over as many years as NAEP has tracked it. Moreover, the degree of the literacy deficit is tightly correlated with the extent to which children depend on school (as distinct from home) for their formal education. The irony, of course, is that the fundamental mission of public schooling is to offer educational opportunity-including laying the foundation for reading well-to all children, regardless of what their homes might offer.

Toward this end, I have what some would call an unconventional idea for improving American children’s reading skills; specifically, embracing the use of voice-recognition software in our nation’s classrooms. It is a solution that will take the support of the “hyper-educated” so, please, hear me out.

It is not that our schools are performing more poorly than in years gone by, but that they have never been very good at teaching kids to read. Today’s students don’t read worse than those of yesteryear, but they read no better, either. The problem is that, today, the literacy demands for a productive, self-sufficient life have increased dramatically. Both individually and collectively, both socially and economically, the future of our country depends vitally on the education of its people.

Nor is it that we haven’t tried to fix this situation. As a recent example, the goal of the federal Reading First initiative was to make sure that all children would leave the primary grades having securely learned and understood the alphabetic basics. Coming at the problem from the other direction, the Common Core State Standards Initiative is centered on ensuring guidance and practice with more sophisticated and informative texts.

Both of these initiatives are important and well-founded, but there is also a lot that must happen in between the two. For students to grapple productively with the intellectual challenges of complex texts, they must first gain the ability to read with fluency and ongoing comprehension. It is with this intermediate challenge that most of our students fall by the wayside. In view of this, this intermediate reading period is where I chose to concentrate in a report released recently on technology for developing children’s language and literacy. I wrote the report for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop with the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

To most, it is obvious that learning to recognize printed words involves skills and practice specific to the written domain. Yet, this is equally true of the vocabulary, grammar, background knowledge, and modes of thought that characterize text. On every dimension, the comprehension requirements of written language are more demanding, less forgiving, and in many ways qualitatively different from those that characterize oral-language situations. And two overarching factors make this situation still tougher: The first is that, because the knowledge and skills required for reading and understanding written language are specific to written language, their acquisition can come about only through experience in reading and understanding written language. The second is that what has not been understood cannot be learned.

It follows that unless and until children can read and understand texts on their own, they need support and instruction to help them through the task. The obvious reason for providing such help is so students gain from the text at hand. The more important reason is so they will be better able to manage the next text on their own.

As I argue in the report, the real crux of the reading problem lies not with the teachers, the parents, the students, television, the Web, or any of the usual culprits to which blame is often passed. The problem instead is that the individual support required for helping children learn to read is way beyond the capacity of the traditional classroom. Children learn remarkably quickly given the opportunity, but again, one cannot learn what one does not understand. No matter how she tries, the classroom teacher cannot give each of her 20 or so students the individual support on which learning to read depends.

With this issue in mind, the specific recommendation in the report is that our country get serious about developing speech-recognition-based reading software for our schools. This is not a pie-in-the-sky proposal. Today, people around the world, using dozens of languages, depend on automatic speech recognition for telephone call-routing and directory assistance. It is widely employed in dictation and information capture in the defense, heath-care, and legal sectors. It is used for captioning live television so we can watch our favorite games in noisy sports bars, and by unnamed agencies for transcribing suspicious communications. It is used by people to talk to their computers and mobile devices, for example, while browsing the Web, creating voice commands, and managing their bookmarks. People use automatic speech recognition to issue commands to their cell phones and, in reverse, to ask their cell phones to transcribe their voice mail and send written copies to their email. They also use it to talk to their TVs, their music players, their cars, and their navigation systems. And, of course, speech recognition is very hot in the gaming industry.

In other words, automatic speech recognition is a technology that is mature and even commonplace in industry after industry, with the salient exception of where it is needed most: education. Whatever the economic or social value of the applications mentioned above, most pale in comparison to the potential of speech recognition as it could and should be used to help people learn to read and read to learn.

Given “ears,” the computer can listen to students as they read, offering help or prompting further thought at just the right moments, while making records of their progress and difficulties in the background. Such technology, in other words, could provide the individualized, one-on-one, interactive support and guidance on which becoming a reader so integrally depends.

In their potential for providing ample, affordable, effective reading support to every child, I believe that speech recognition-based reading applications should be a priority. Were we to redirect just a fraction of the time, genius, and creativity now devoted to developing ever more seductive ways for us to play games, to watch unwelcome ads, and otherwise to waste our time with our mobile devices and computers, we could do this. But until we somehow convince the hyper-educated to support such innovation, it will not happen.

Marilyn Jager Adams is a visiting scholar in the cognitive, linguistics, and psychological sciences department at Brown University, in Providence, R.I. She has been a member of either the planning or steering committee of the National Assessment of Educational Progress in reading since 1992. Her report “Technology for Developing Children’s Language and Literacy: Bringing Speech Recognition to the Classroom” can be downloaded for free here.