On January 24, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center released the results of a national survey of more than 1500 parents of children ages 2-10, and their perceptions of educational media use at home. Read on for slides from the Learning at Home Forum last week and highlights from the report.

 

We were thrilled to see a standing-room only crowd at our venue, the second floor galleries at McGraw Hill in midtown Manhattan. Michael Levine welcomed the audience and provided an introduction to our Families and Media Project.

Author Vicky Rideout then took the stage to introduce the report and to discuss some of the key findings.

The room was full of children’s media producers and researchers. Many were surprised by some of the key findings, including the drop-off in educational media use that occurs after age four, and the fact that despite the rise of mobile, parents still view television as the more “educational” medium.

Amy Jordan then took the podium to moderate the first session about finding and creating great content for kids.

Debra Sanchez, CPB, spoke about the implications for mobile: when parents hand their devices off to their kids, they are essentially opting out of this experience.

David Kleeman, SVP of Insights at PlayCollective, offered a provocative commentary on the quality of media available to kids as “educational,” and pointed out that many children find educational value and meaning in content that may not be explicitly designed as such.

Seeta Pai from Common Sense Media discussed findings around parents choices and the evaluation of media products. She mentioned their ratings for parents, and graphite.org, their new ratings site for educators.

Melina Bellows of National Geographic Kids shared her experience in making science facts fun to learn, and provided us all with the factoid that none of us will forget:

A stat from the report that surprised many in the audience: very few parents surveyed think of Minecraft as educational.

Lisa Guernsey moderated the second session of the day to discuss some of the ethnic and socioeconomic findings of the report, and the issues of access and equity.

Melvin Ming, CEO of Sesame Workshop, introduced FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel.

Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel of the FCC delivered the keynote address. You can read her remarks here.

The final session wrapped up the Forum by gathering action items to create change in digital media and access for all children.

We’re thrilled to see that the report has been covered by a variety of news outlets:

• Screen Time Study Finds Education Drop-Off | New York Times
• 2 to 4 year olds are most frequent users of educational media, study finds | Washington Post
• Do tablets teach? Parents see mobile devices as underachievers, study finds. | Christian Science Monitor
• Survey: Kids’ educational media diets still dominated by TV | USA Today
• Cooney study leaves new questions for educational media creators | Kidscreen
• How Do Parents Think ‘Educational’ Screen Time Affects Learning? | Mind/Shift
• 8 Surprising Facts About How Kids Learn From Screen Time | Forbes

 

Dale Kunkel, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus of Communication at the University of Arizona. He spoke as a provocateur at the Learning at Home Forum on January 24, 2014 in New York. Here, he shares his thoughts on the dearth of quality educational content for older kids on various platforms, including television, mobile devices, and video games. A video of his remarks is available below.

Kids spend several hours every day with screen media – watching TV, surfing the Internet, playing video games, exploring computer apps, and so on.  How much of that time is well spent?  According to a new study from the Cooney Center, children aged 2-10 devote nearly an hour a day to media content that parents consider educational.  That sounds like good news.  By the age of 12, if that finding were consistent across the age span, that equals more time than is spent in the classroom over two full school years.  But this new study also tells us the picture is not so rosy.

Use of educational media is heavily concentrated in early childhood, mostly between 2-4 years of age.  It drops almost in half by the time kids are 5-7 years old, and roughly in half again for ages 8-10.  A separate trend shows that as children grow, they increase their total time using screen media significantly.  Put these two findings together, and one sees a badly missed opportunity.  Older children watch the most screen media, yet spend the least amount of time with any educational content.

In the late 1960s, when television was still relatively new, the creators of Sesame Street pioneered the production of highly engaging and educational media content for young children.  Children’s Television Workshop (now known as Sesame Workshop) produced the program, establishing one of the most cost-effective educational efforts ever pursued in the U.S.  Millions of children gained significant learning from Sesame Street at a cost of pennies per child in terms of the funding invested from government and philanthropic sources.  The model proved so popular, Sesame productions were adopted in dozens of countries world-wide.

There have been other hit shows produced over the years by Sesame and a handful of other educational producers, but most such programs are geared primarily to younger kids, and it’s been that way for a long time.  I can’t think of a single noteworthy “tween”-targeted TV show with strong learning value over the past decade.

If there’s a shortage of educational content on television for older kids, the new Cooney Center report shows things are even worse for most of the new media that are popular with this age group, such as video games, Internet-connected computers, and mobile devices.  According to parents, children spend an average of only 5 minutes a day with educational games or software on a computer, 5 minutes a day of educational activities on mobile devices like a smartphone or iPad, and 3 minutes a day playing educational video games.  Contrast these numbers with children’s overall time spent with these electronic media, and the “missed opportunity” picture comes more clearly into focus.

Academic achievement among U.S. children continues to slip precipitously.  We lag behind major competitors like China and even emerging economies like Poland in scores on science and math.  Steps are obviously needed to reverse this trend, and it’s apparent that increasing traditional funding for the schools is not viable, especially as the nation struggles to recover from a recession.  An obvious alternative that is consistently overlooked is using electronic media to stimulate and promote children’s interest in learning.  Given the large potential audience for electronic media, such efforts can be cost effective beyond one’s wildest imagination.

In the 1980s, Ed Palmer, the long-time Vice-President of Research for Sesame Workshop, proposed a novel idea.  Palmer argued the government should provide a penny a child per day to support the development of educational media for children.  At current population levels, this would yield about $250 million annually to stimulate the development and availability of educational media for youth of all ages.  We already spend an average of roughly $58 per day per child to support in-school education.  For the tiniest fraction more per child, funding could be provided to jump-start creation of educational media content for kids, including the new media that are quickly becoming an integral part of their everyday lives.  As new media continue to attract greater amounts of children’s time, it seems a shame to see them used them simply to amuse or to market products to the nation’s youth. That seems to be the path we are currently following.

Electronic media are potentially the most cost efficient — yet still the most neglected — form of educational technology ever invented.  We have little reservation about using government funding to stimulate the economy in difficult times.  People understand that such investments yield benefits over time in terms of increased employment and economic expansion.  As we face increasing challenges to successfully educate all segments of America’s youth, it makes perfect sense to similarly invest in innovative fashion to stimulate children’s learning.  In a world where one of every eight 2-7 year-olds is already using an iPad or similar tablet device on a daily basis, imagine the benefits if they could engage some truly age-appropriate educational content in addition to – dare I say instead of – playing Angry Birds!

Dale Kunkel (Ph.D., Annenberg School, University of Southern California, 1984) is Professor Emeritus of Communication at the University of Arizona.  Kunkel has studied children and media issues for more than 30 years.  He is a former Congressional Science Fellow, and has testified as an expert witness at more than a dozen hearings before the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives, the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.  His research has examined such topics as children’s educational media, the effects of televised violence, media and sexual socialization, and the effects of advertising on children. Over his career, Kunkel has received research grants totaling more than $5 million from a diverse range of sources, including government agencies, the media industry, and public health philanthropies such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.  He was recently named a Fellow of the Morris Udall Center for Public Policy Studies, and has also received the International Communication Association’s career award for Outstanding Public Policy Research and the Broadcast Education Association’s Distinguished Lifetime Scholarship Award.  
Special thanks to Scott Traylor of 360kid.com for the video. Homepage slideshow credit: Flickr/Ann and Tim

 

David Kleeman, SVP, Insights Programs and PlayVangelist, PlayCollective, delivered these provocative remarks at the Learning at Home Forum in New York on January 24. The text of his commentary is posted below the video.

You can read his blog post, “Kids and Educational Media: Desire to Learn vs. Design to Teach” on the Huffington Post.

Good morning, and thanks to the Michael and Vicky for inviting me to comment.  I’ve been outspoken about educational media before, and hope to be provocative today.

I’ll talk a lot about TV, but the strategy and policy implications are similar across platforms, because the educational value of media has as much to do with the child’s needs, interests and abilities as with the attributes of the program, game, app, or website.

I have two central points:

First, maybe kids stop consuming educational media because what we offer isn’t relevant or real to them, and before we pursue the report recommendation to create more content in curriculum areas parents rate as weak, we need to answer why what we have now doesn’t work for kids.

Second, many older kids are engaged with educational media, just not as defined by the research. Pursuit of media in the interest of a passion or curiosity – via resources like YouTube or Google – supplants consumption of packaged media designed to teach something. Interestingly, when the survey questioned parents about their own educational media use, the examples given were of self-directed, connected learning – looking up a recipe, getting health information or answering questions.

In some cases, kids feel they learn from media even when it has no educative intent. A German research institute asked 7-10 year olds which programs they learn from. Over 50% of the American boys talked about friendship and sharing lessons in “Spongebob.” We make meaning from media, based on our own needs.

Earlier this week, as a nominating juror for the international children’s TV festival, I watched over 200 shows from around the world.  Let me describe three that I found wonderfully educational, and ask whether they’d meet the study definition: “good for your child’s learning or growth, or that teaches some type of lesson, such as an academic or social skill.”

• Canadian kids designed and built playgrounds for their communities and, yes, the kids used the power tools themselves;
• Irish teens documented one day in their lives, via user-generated videos;
• A Brazilian telenovela dramatized the different challenges faced by twins – one white and one black.

By and large – we don’t make shows like these.  When an American kid turns on TV, how often do they see any clue as to where they are, or who they are?  How often do they see news or documentaries made for them?  By the way, no American company entered a non-fiction program in the festival, except in the preschool category.

And here’s a conundrum. Most U.S. educational kids’ TV is curriculum-based, but in the German study I mentioned, American kids barely mentioned learning facts from TV. German kids – who get their own news, plus magazines and documentaries – listed factual learning first.

When the U.S. gets anxious about children’s time spent with media – and we do, moreso than any other country – we add education.  Other countries seek to draw their content closer to the audience.

The Children’s Television Act provides a cautionary tale about policy solutions. Broadcasters treated the 3-hour educational programming mandate as a ceiling, not a floor – kids got the minimum. When broadcasters called their shows “FCC friendly,” it was clear that regulators, not children, were their primary audience. “Educational” TV isn’t necessarily “quality” TV and, while the government can shows with educational goals, it can’t demand that the show be any good. After a few innovative efforts at the start, broadcasters found they had no incentive to invest – financially or creatively – in their E/I shows for older kids, and ratings flatlined.

Yes, educational content on free media is important, but it’s condescending and wasteful to give mediocre content to those with the fewest resources. Perhaps it’s time to revisit the option of commercial broadcasters supporting public service media instead of airing unwatched programs.

By contrast, when Australia sought to enhance children’s TV, the government mandated home-produced content, but also created production grants and tax credits. Producers competed for funds and commissions, and Australia now has a reputation for high-quality “small e” educational programming.

There are a few important questions that this study didn’t ask:

• Do parents see and value learning from media beyond explicit curriculum – 21^st Century skills like collaboration, communication, perspective-taking or lateral thinking?
• Do parents see and value meta-learning from media engagement – media literacy and critical thinking; logic, programming or technology skills?
• Does parental experience result in higher opinion of educational value? Minecraft scored poorly, but nearly half of all parents didn’t know enough to rate it. Video games got low marks for social skills learning; do gamer parents better see games’ potential for collaboration or communication?

So, how can we help parents see and extract the educational value in a wider range of media? Good tools exist, like Common Sense Media and Children’s Technology Review. We need a wide range of resources, though, so parents can find the ones that match their values and media matrix.

While the study recommends engaging an independent organization to code media for educational content, I’d be concerned about creating one box, where what fits inside is educational and the rest is not. This doesn’t consider the needs of the child or the whole-child view of learning.  It also can stifle innovation and lead to regression to the mean creatively, as producers chase a stamp of approval by producing to the rubric.

In closing, content creators need to communicate better why their products are educational. I counsel them to talk about what they’ve put in – their teaching philosophy and how they mean for the product to be used – rather than promising or suggesting outcomes. To say what you are teaching is a statement of intent, but learning is a complex process with external and contextual forces that media makers can’t control.

I look forward to the discussion!

 

Special thanks to Scott Traylor of 360kid.com for the video.

Debra Sanchez is Senior Vice President for Education and Children’s Content Operations for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She spoke as a provocateur at the Learning at Home Forum on January 24, 2014 in New York. Here, she shares her thoughts on media as a learning tool for children both as a public media professional and a mother of two.

I am the mother of two media-savvy and media-driven kids, a daughter who is ten and son who is seven. I am also a professional in the media business. You’d think I’d be the most well-informed parent on the block about how best to guide my kids’ media interests. Truth be told, I don’t always guide my kids’ media interests. Not that I don’t try, but I certainly need help.  In addition to my husband and our two kids, our home has several “media residents” including three TV’s, Apple TV, Digital Cable, a desktop PC, two laptops, a Wii gaming console, two iPhones, three iPod Touchs, two iPads, two Kindle Fires and a Nintendo DS. My “media residents” can make my job as a parent challenging as I try to keep up with my kids’ digital cravings, making sure they are safe and good digital decision-makers, and helping to prepare them for the future. At the same time, my work in public media has shown me that media can be a very valuable learning tool.  The issue I believe we face is helping families make sense of the opportunities that this rapidly evolving digital media landscape presents.  I reflected on both of my roles—parent and media professional—when I was asked to present at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s forum and release of the Center’s new report, Learning at Home: Families’ Educational Media Use in America.

This groundbreaking research seeks to determine the answers to a number of questions: What media children ages 2-10 use at home?  How much of it is educational? To what degree are parents and children using media together?  As I read the report, I thought about the various roles we play in public media—as content creators and distributors, community conveners, educator resources, and more.  The findings of the Learning at Home report should be a catalyst for discussion among public media professionals and ultimately enrich our service in a fragmented media landscape. This is particularly significant since the findings of the Cooney Center report underscore the high value of television as a primary means for kids accessing educational content.  In other words, how can public media best leverage the fact that TV is still king? How does it enhance that experience on other platforms for the greatest educational gains?  And, very importantly, how does public media help connect parents to their kids media learning experiences so that they are not on the outside looking in?

From decades of research, including several studies from public media’s Ready To Learn program, we know that not only do parents play a key role in exposing their children to educational media, but also in helping their children get the most educational benefit from the media they consume. For example, a 2013 WestEd study in which parents and young children played PBS KIDS math games online together suggested a positive cycle of media engagement, in which parents became more aware of their child’s mathematics learning, and responded by supporting that learning, which resulted in children learning even more from the games they were playing.

As encouraging as this is, the Cooney Center report shows that there is much less joint media engagement around mobile devices, video games, and computers—an average of three minutes each per day—compared with the 49 minutes of television that parents and children watch together each day. What opportunities for deeper engagement and learning are being lost as children use these new digital media devices on their own—without the engagement of a parent or an older sibling?  As media creators, how can we better keep parents aware of what their children are learning, and construct intergenerational media experiences, including games that parents and children can enjoy and learn from together?  Finally, how can we draw on our expertise in children’s television—still the most popular media for families to use together and the most often used for educational purposes—to ensure that the children and families who are least likely to access newer technologies are able to benefit from the latest educational research and innovations?

The release of the Learning at Home report marks the beginning of an important and needed discussion about how best to support families dealing with their own “media residents” so that we are all working together to help children learn and grow.

A video of her talk is available here.

Debra Sanchez is Senior Vice President for Education and Children’s Content Operations for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She develops and oversees children’s content investments and educational initiatives at the national level and works closely with stations to enhance their development and execution of local educational services. Prior to joining CPB, she was Vice President of Government Relations for the Association of Public Television Stations (APTS). In this role, she was the primary education policy professional for the public television community and provided strategic counsel on pursuing Pre-K to postsecondary federal initiatives. Working with Members of Congress on Capitol Hill, Sanchez built bipartisan support for the Ready To Learn and Ready to Teach initiatives and worked aggressively to have these successfully included in the No Child Left Behind Act. Sanchez also worked to secure annual federal appropriations for both programs. Prior to her work in public broadcasting, she was a special education teacher in Arlington, Virginia and Highland, Indiana. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Special Education from Indiana University.

(Photo on homepage slideshow from Flickr/ Jerine Lay)

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel delivered the keynote address at the Cooney Center’s Learning at Home forum on Friday, January 24, 2014.

 

Good afternoon.  Thank you to the Cooney Center for having me here today.  Thank you to Vicky Rideout for inviting me to join you and for the incredible work you do in your studies of children and media.  Thank you also to Mel Ming, the President of Sesame Workshop, for such a kind introduction.

I actually met with Mel very early during my tenure as a Commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission.  At the time, it seemed like the right thing to do.  Because I am a Sesame Street kid.  I was among the first generation of children to watch and learn from the small screen antics of Big Bird and friends.  Even better, my children are Sesame Street kids.  They too know about sunny days, sweeping the clouds away, and how to get to where the air is sweet.

But how we got here—to a new digital world, that is another story.  Today I want to talk about this new digital age and the opportunities it presents for children, media, and education.  But before I do, I want to tell a quick tale.

Imagine: It’s 1966.  Joan Ganz Cooney—the namesake of this center—decides to gather friends and colleagues for dinner.  This takes place in an apartment, some blocks south from where we are right now.  She is a producer for Channel Thirteen, the first public broadcasting station in New York.  The table includes Lewis Freedman, who is her boss.  It also seats Lloyd Morrisett, an executive at the Carnegie Corporation and an expert in funding educational research.

Conversation at the table turns to the possibilities of television.  Now before I go on, think television in 1966.  That means glass screens encased in bulky wood-paneled boxes.  That means antenna ears.  That means changing channels by turning the dial rightward with a noisy set of clicks.  The number of television channels was limited—and we watched only what was on, when it was on.  So in 1966 that was The Green Hornet, That Girl, and The Jackie Gleason Show.

As the story goes, Lloyd Morrisett began to speak about his daughter Sarah.  She was fascinated with television.  At age three, she apparently sat before the glow of the set and tuned in to watch test patterns before any programming even lit up the screen.  She also had memorized a slew of commercial jingles.  She could sing them on command.  In time, conversation over dinner migrates.  If television could capture a child’s attention like that, what else could it do?  So the question at dinner was not whether or not children would learn from television.  The answer was obvious—they would.  The question was what could they learn?

Now you might look back on that dinner conversation and think now there was nothing especially novel about it.  But it was radical.  Because in 1966 it would have been easy to write off television as a tool for teaching.  After all, only five years earlier President John F. Kennedy’s Chairman of the FCC, Newton Minow, famously called television programming a “vast wasteland.”

So shrugging off the educational possibilities of television would have been simple.  It would have been the conventional wisdom.  But instead of discounting this powerful platform, they decided then and there to explore what empowering things it could do.

In due course, history was made.  Because that small conversation led to something big.  It led to a study funded by the Carnegie Corporation on the power of television and the possibilities for education.  That study gave shape to what became the Children’s Television Workshop and yielded Sesame Street.  In its wake, a whole range of quality children’s television programming followed.

Now speed to the present.  The gale force of digitization is remaking our world.  We live in an age of always-on connectivity.  The number of screens has multiplied.  Increased broadband capacity and decreased costs of cloud computing are changing the ways we access content.  So many of our social spaces are virtual.  And mobility means the invisible infrastructure of our airwaves is responsible for so much more than television.

In fact, we are now a nation with more mobile phones than people.  One in three adults has a tablet computer—and that number is growing fast.  Our children, however, still watch an average of three to four hours of television a day.  According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, that means that by the time they graduate high school they will have spent more time watching television than they have in the classroom.  But as screens proliferate, our children’s habits are changing.  Three-quarters of all children now have access to a mobile device like a smartphone or tablet.  Seventy-two percent of children under age eight have used these devices for some kind of media activity.  Almost one in five now do so on a daily basis.  Among teenagers, half own their own smartphones.  Nine in ten have used social media and 95 percent use the Internet regularly.

As Jim Steyer, from Common Sense Media suggests, we may think of our children’s online and mobile activities as their “digital lives.”  But that’s wrong.  Because their plugged-in, networked world is life.

So just like those guests at dinner a few decades ago, I think we need to resist the easy temptation to dismiss the possibilities of so many new screens, connections, and technologies.  Because the fundamental issue is the same.  It is not a question of whether or not children will learn from these new digital platforms.  They will.  The question is what could they learn?

That is how I look at these issues from a policy perspective.

It is also how I look at them as a parent.  After all, I am someone who knows the challenge of a household with two parents with two jobs, two children at two schools, and too few hours in the day.  I also know good parenting sometimes requires turning it off and shutting it down.

Still, I think there is real promise in new digital media.  We have within reach the ability to call up quality programming when we want it, where we want it.  We have a whole new realm of interactive and educational media that combines text, video, and gaming.  This can multiply opportunities for joint media engagement between parents and children that researchers like Vicky Rideout teach us are so important.  Just as important for the busy parent, these opportunities can occur anywhere.  Because we can take our connected devices everywhere.

So from parenting back to policymaking.  We need to seize the possibilities for good in these new media platforms.  Just like what was done with television more than four decades ago.  Think about how the work of the Carnegie Commission spurred the development of Sesame Street.  Think about how that made quality preschool programming viable—and widely available.  Think also about how the Children’s Television Act spurred the development of more educational programming by requiring a minimum of three hours per week on stations using the airwaves.  And then ask what we can do now to stimulate more quality digital age educational content—and make it more widely available.

That leads me to what at first glance might seem like an unexpected place.  It leads me to E-Rate.  E-Rate is the nation’s largest educational technology program.  It helps connect all of our schools and libraries to modern communications and the Internet.  E-rate support is based on need.  More funding is available for those schools and libraries serving low-income students and those located in rural areas.  The program is run by the FCC.

E-Rate is a byproduct of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.  Now think back for a moment to 1996.  You and I probably called the Internet the “Information Superhighway.”  It was a long time ago.  Back when the law was passed, only 14 percent of the nation’s public schools had access to the Internet.  Today, thanks to the support that E-Rate has provided, more than 95 percent of schools are now connected.

That might sound like the E-Rate job is done.  But nothing could be further from the truth.  Because the challenge today is not connection—it’s capacity.  Too many of our E-Rate schools access the Internet at speeds as slow as 3 Megabits.  That is lower than the speed of the average American home.  But in many cases, those schools have 200 times as many users!

Think about what that means.  It means too many schools do not have the capacity to offer high definition streaming video.  It means too many schools are unable to take advantage of the most innovative digital teaching tools.  It means too many students will lack the ability to develop the science, technology, engineering, and math—or STEM skills—that we know are so essential to compete.

Now the good news.  We are doing something about it.  At the FCC we recently started a reform effort to put in place a modernized E-Rate system—what I like to call E-Rate 2.0.  We are gathering ideas and combing through commentary on the program from stakeholders of every stripe.  In the end, we want to give this program new focus.  We want to make it a program that supports more than simple Internet connectivity.  We want it to support capacity—really high-speed broadband to all of our schools.

Let me put some numbers on that and tell you what I mean by really high-speed broadband.  In the near term, we want to have 100 Megabits per 1000 students to all of our schools.  By the end of the decade, we want to have 1 Gigabit per 1000 students to all of our schools.

I think we can do it.  I also think the E-Rate reform effort and the interests of quality educational content collide—in the best possible way.

By bringing really high-speed broadband to every school in every community across the country we will create new opportunities for educational content at new scale.  This scale has the potential to stimulate a new market for digital educational media.

This could be especially powerful for content aimed at older children.  As so many studies have demonstrated, there is an alarming drop in educational media use after the very earliest years.  While we have succeeded in reaching preschool children with educational television, we have a more mixed record with older children.  But here is where I think new interactive digital technologies and mobile platforms are full of possibility.  They can engage beyond simple text and video.  They can target communities with unique needs.  They can reinforce essential skills through interactive gaming.  And by bringing high-speed bandwidth to schools everywhere, I think we can spur a whole new range of providers to develop this kind of educational content.

In addition, a reformed E-Rate speaks to the issues of equity and access that informed the work of the Carnegie Commission four decades ago.  That is because a reformed E-Rate program will also make broadband more widely available.

Today, three out of ten households do not have broadband access.  Think about what it means to be a student in one of those households—typically low-income and often rural.  It means just getting homework done is hard.  It means applying for a scholarship is challenging.  By bringing broadband to all of our schools, we will make digital age opportunities more broadly available.

I think E-Rate reform is important.  I think it speaks to the mission of so many of you in this room.  Because if you care about educational media, E-Rate could help stimulate a new world of quality content.  And as I suggested at the outset, the question is not whether or not children will learn from the proliferation of so many new screens, connections, and technologies.  They will.  The question is what could they learn?

A generation ago, Joan Ganz Cooney and the Carnegie Commission harnessed the power of television to provide a powerful answer to that question.  They taught us that television can teach.  They showed us that it can help build early literacy and numeracy skills that lay the foundation for later learning.

Now we can do even more.  Because we are at a new and exciting inflection point in educational media.  With an updated E-Rate, we have an opportunity to harness digital and mobile technologies and teach in new ways.  We can extend the reach of broadband in our schools and expand the range educational content.  We can seize the good in these new technologies and help prepare all of our children for success in the 21^st century.  And as a policymaker—and a parent—I think that is something worth fighting for.

Thank you.

 

 

The Commissioner’s remarks are available for download from the FCC.gov website. Special thanks to Scott Traylor of 360kid.com for the video.

Special thanks to Scott Traylor of 360Kid for this video.

Learning at Home author Vicky Rideout speaks about some of the key findings from the report.

Special thanks to 360Kid for this video.

Millions of American children received tablets, mobile phones, game consoles, and other screen devices over the holidays, making our youngest citizens an important force in media and technology consumption. At the same time, educators, policymakers and journalists like Amanda Ripley and Tom Friedman are bemoaning the lack of achievement motivation among America’s children as we fall behind our international competitors in science and math. So while tech sales volumes were high over the holiday season, it seems we may have forgotten to ask a vital question: how much of the time kids spend on these devices is helping them prepare for their futures? Are the tablets and apps that parents are buying for them signaling a shift towards compelling educational content? Not yet, according to the people who should know best: their parents.

According to a national survey of more than 1500 parents of children age 2 to 10 released by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, we have found that although kids’ media use soars as they approach school age, the amount of time that they spend with educational media plummets. Key findings from the report Learning at Home: Families’ Educational Media Use in America, written by Vicky Rideout, include:

• More than half of parents (57%) believe their children have learned “a lot” from educational media, but that learning from mobile devices falls short compared to other platforms.
• While screen media use increases from 1 ½ to 2 ½ hours as children get older, there is an alarming drop from 78% to 27% in the proportion devoted to educational content.
• More than half (57%) of parents say their child has learned “a lot” about one or more subjects from educational media, including (28%) of parents who say their children have learned about math and even more (37%) who report that educational media have helped their children ” a lot” with reading. But, these numbers drop dramatically when it comes to learning about science (19%) or the arts (15%).
• There are significant ethnic and racial differences in how parents perceive the value of educational media, with African Americans (91%) most likely to say their children learned “a lot or some” about math from media compared to 79% of Whites and 63% of Hispanic-Latinos.
• The report also finds that parents say a smaller proportion of the time their children spend with mobile devices (36%) is educational as compared with TV (52%), and that their children have learned less from mobile than from TV.

What do these trends suggest? First, we must tap into the unfulfilled promise of the more than tens of thousands of apps marketed as educational for children. A recent report by the Cooney Center and New America found a disturbing disconnect between children’s needs in early learning and literacy and the current bestselling apps. Producers and educators need to do a better job of documenting the impact that the new media are having on learning, and create information campaigns to help aid in the often difficult discovery process. Two new important resources in this field are the Common Sense Media educational rating systems for parents and their new service for educators called Graphite. The new Google Play for Education site is also a noteworthy advance in identifying the “good stuff.”

Second, as the Learning at Home report suggests, we need to do a much better job of getting timely and accurate information to parents. Independent efforts to provide ratings and reviews about the educational value of various media titles should be supported and enhanced. Our survey indicates that more than half (55%) of parents say they would like more information from experts about how to find good TV shows, games, and websites to support their child’s learning. Lower-income, Hispanic-Latino, and less-educated parents are even more likely to express that need. Organizations such as Common Sense Media and the Children’s Technology Review provide much-needed ratings for parents, but there are clearly many others who need easy access to this information. We should support expansion of these services and ensure that even more parents become aware of how to use them. One challenge is to get good information about children’s media to low-income and minority families. Foundations and government leaders should encourage public-private partnerships between independent experts and parent groups to help guide discovery and distribution of evidence based products and models.

The report reminds us all that the most important group to reach are those who have a dearth of other educational opportunities in their lives–this is “where the use of informal educational media in the home can help fill the gaps and reduce achievement disparities.” But Rideout points out that it “is just these children–those who don’t have an abundance of developmentally appropriate toys and books in the home or whose environments may not be as verbally rich as other children’s–who are often lacking access to the newest media platforms.”

The clear implication is that in all of the excitement among venture capitalists, tech companies and digital media advocates to shift their focus toward developing content for mobile platforms, we also need to keep in mind that these platforms still don’t reach many of these children.

In the next few years, as access issues become less of an obstacle to adoption, let’s rethink the unique purpose and positioning of public media. Let’s first create as much engaging, educational content as possible for the platform that is omnipresent and free. Then let’s convert that high quality content into the best tools that schools, Head Start centers and other youth serving organizations can use for no or low cost. In a sense, Learning at Home should be a clarion call to take the public media system back to its roots–as a key ally with parents as children’s first teachers. Will producers of educational media respond wisely? Time, which is running in short supply for many traditional broadcasters, will tell.

** The results of this survey are now available in the Digital Games and Family Life infographic series **

Back in 2012, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center embarked on a multi-stakeholder game design project, also known as “Hard Fun: Learning Mathematics,” funded by the NSF with lead designers at E-Line Media and premier researchers in neuroscience from University of Rochester and Johns Hopkins University. The goal was to design and research an educational game that both parents and kids would find just as interesting and fun to play as commercial entertainment games like Call of Duty or Mario Kart. To best inform design and marketing decisions, the Center conducted two rounds of focus groups with parents and kids ages 7-11. We designed the questions to help gauge parent beliefs and attitudes about video games and how they shape decisions around purchases and mediation of kids video game play. We also wanted to know what filter parents approach these decisions with and where they draw the line between what’s appropriate and inappropriate.

Some key things we discovered included:

• Parents in the sessions grew up playing video games, and the majority of them still continue to play them today. Some even lamented about today’s games not being as challenging as the games they grew up with, such as The Legend of Zelda.
• The parents who grew up playing video games expressed their enjoyment of playing games as a whole family or watching each other play.
• Parents of younger children (ages 7-9) were generally more concerned about violence than the parents of older children since the 10- to 11-year-olds are already exposed to mature games, often beyond parental control.
• Parents in the session came to realize that many of the games they consider age-appropriate do contain violence in the tradition of the Road Runner and Wiley Coyote cartoons, but it’s the realistic stuff that parents most object to.

Given that these findings were from a small set of parents and children, we wanted to dig deeper using multiple research methods to further explore this issue with a wider U.S. population. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center has developed a survey, known as The Digital Games and Family Life Survey, that will further inform design and marketing decisions for the “Hard Fun” project as well as others who want to design learning games. This is an exciting and important time to conduct such a survey given that more affordable and portable gaming platforms are popping up left and right and thus, have led to video games showing up in other life settings. Both schools and the workplace have realized the motivational power of video games, and in recent years started to seek out strategies to deepen learning and improve productivity. For this survey of parents of 4-13-year-olds, our research team sets out to get a sense of the role that digital games are playing in modern family life and routines, across both place and time.

This survey ties back to the focus groups by recognizing that parents today grew up playing video games themselves and that their histories and relationships with video games essentially impact their parenting practices around video games. This focus is unlike past surveys that have typically focused on adults separately from children, or asked parents about their children’s gameplay rather than their own. The survey also serves to help us understand parents’ attitudes and practices around video game play and how it varies across demographics such as children’s ages, family structure, location, etc.

With this post, we officially launch the survey! The Cooney Center, in partnership with the Center for Games and Impact at Arizona State University, invites parents of children ages 4 through 13 to take the Digital Games and Family Life Survey. We will keep the survey open for about a month and will release findings in Spring 2014. By taking this survey or disseminating it to your networks, you will be helping designers, developers, and researchers create the best games for families to enjoy, while also moving this exciting research and design project forward!

** Edited: 2/28/2013: This survey is now closed. **