Photo courtesy of Elisabeth McClure

We’re pleased to introduce our newest Cooney Center Fellow, Elisabeth McClure.  She has just joined us this month from Georgetown University, where she is completing her PhD in Human Development and Public Policy.

Elisabeth’s graduate work was inspired by research about the video deficit effect, which finds that children under two years old learn better from live interaction with people than from video presentations. Her work on video chat with children under two years old included a family media usage survey among parents across the Washington, D.C. area, in which she found that a vast majority of families reported that their young children have used video chat, and nearly 40 percent used it once a week. Encouragingly, her research found that both adults and young children seem to be positively engaged by video chat, despite the challenges it can present. You can read more about her work in The Atlantic.

We’re thrilled to be working with Elisabeth, whose interest in developmental psychology and public policy makes her a perfect fit for the Cooney Center team. Over the next year, she will focus on several projects, including  InTEL: Integrating Technology in Early Literacy and an NSF-funded project to bring together researchers, policymakers, and early childhood program leaders to find ways to bring evidence-based research about early childhood learning in STEM to the classroom.

We hope you will join us in welcoming our newest fellow!

This commentary was originally published on EdWeek.com on September 16, 2015.

Photo: Matt Beard

This fall, 3.5 million children will start kindergarten in the United States. One-quarter of them will be Hispanic, more than 90 percent of whom are U.S.-born, and just over one-third of whom are growing up below the poverty line. Hispanic kindergartners score lower in reading and mathematics than all other ethnic groups, and more than 8 in 10 are not yet proficient readers by 4th grade. And, if current trends continue, over one-third of the Hispanic children who start their educations this fall will drop out before they finish high school.

These statistics are not only unacceptable, they are also indicators of an education system in peril. To better identify which priorities should drive the next round of national debates on educational equity as we move into a new election cycle, our research teams have engaged in national and community-level research to investigate how low-income Hispanic families integrate technology and educational media into everyday routines, and how tech use influences relationships within families and with educators and schools.

We conducted in-depth interviews with 336 parents and their school-age children, in three districts (located in Arizona, California, and Colorado). We have also completed two national surveys: one with low-income Hispanic parents (with children ages 2 to 10) about educational media use at home, and a second this summer with 1,200 low-income parents of different ethnicities (with children in grades K-8) to assess how they view technologies’ influence on learning, in school and out.

Our research clearly demonstrates that while the technologies themselves are usually touted as the change factor, relationships matter most. Parents’ relationships with administrators and teachers are crucial to how they integrate technology at home. Many parents depend on teacher-recommended online resources to guide children’s out-of-school learning. Schools’ outreach to parents when adopting new digital learning platforms—specifically how a district promotes the program to families, and how programs respond to parents’ needs and concerns—is also critical to maintaining families’ trust. In one of our study sites, a hasty shift to a digital curriculum had the unintended consequence of limiting immigrant parents’ ability to help their children with their homework.

We also examined how technology adoption affects family relationships. Parents’ own tech-related attitudes directly affect how children use technology to complete assignments and to pursue their own interests. Furthermore, we found that collaborative engagement with technology can support students’ classroom learning and enhance their tech-related skills. Parents and children fluidly trade expert and learner roles as they use technology together, and do so even more frequently in Spanish-dominant, immigrant-headed households. These experiences point to two especially important family assets: strong traditions of family interaction related to technology use, and parents’ deep motivations to learn new ways to support their children’s success.

How might we strengthen the home-school and family relationships we have found are critical to successfully supporting Hispanic students on a much larger scale? Here are three action steps for policymakers and education leaders to consider:

We need to support educators so that they can support the nation’s families.

While schools are critical in the fight for educational equity, they can’t do it alone—as every educator already knows. We also know that children spend fewer hours in school than they do at home and in community spaces that serve as informal learning environments. Our research suggests that mobile technologies provide exciting opportunities to link different spaces where children learn.

Schools have yet to capitalize on the promise such technologies hold for supporting learning and development, however. A recent PBS survey suggests one contributing factor: While 76 percent of the nation’s K-12 teachers are using digital media in their classrooms, only 33 percent of pre-K teachers are doing so. These findings suggest that training for early educators is both urgently needed and potentially very powerful for getting low-income families on a trajectory for confident engagement with digital technologies right from the start.

Administrators, policymakers, and curriculum developers need to develop practical, sustainable ways to support teachers’ digital practices. And, as more early-childhood teachers begin using digital media, innovative curricula that integrate digital pedagogical practices will become critical.

Supporting educators cannot end with a focus on technology. Building meaningful relationships with families in increasingly diverse districts requires modernizing existing teacher-training programs and providing ongoing support for established teachers. Such efforts should enable teachers to develop the skills and sensitivities needed to establish trust, identify family assets and concerns, and work together with parents to achieve sustainable change.

We must empower families as partners for achieving equity.

Proactively partnering with families to ensure their children’s educational success is equally important. While low-income minority families are often viewed in terms of their limitations (in education, English proficiency, income, and so on), we counsel for moving from a deficit framing of families to one that emphasizes how their assets can contribute to realizing the changes we need in K-12 education.

Therefore, while conversations about digital equity inevitably focus on students and their schools, homes are key sites for children’s learning. Wiring underserved schools and community institutions will not close opportunity gaps unless we do the same for the homes where children live. Our research demonstrates the importance of considering students as part of families—and for making families meaningful partners in developing new digital pathways to learning and school success.

For example, school and districtwide shifts to digital curricula should only be done at a pace that allows parents to keep up with the changes to how their children learn and do homework. One key implication for policymakers is to redesign how the federal Title I program’s family-engagement programs are delivered, and to ensure that national initiatives to encourage school and home tech use (such as ConnectEd and EveryoneOn) engage parents in every stage of the process. Rapid, uncritical adoption of technological innovations is very likely to leave parents behind, reduce their capabilities to help with their children’s schoolwork, and exacerbate intergenerational differences that ultimately disadvantage students’ academic advancement, rather than enhance it.

We must recognize that well-informed public-private partnerships can be catalysts for change.

To drive national commitments for effective digital innovation in education, we recommend that existing public-private partnerships develop or renew their focus on equity and local capacity-building. Our research reveals that national programs to address digital inequality are often out of tune with community needs. For example, the 170 families we interviewed in three states were all eligible for discounted broadband via Connect2Compete, but fewer than 20 were online via this flagship K-12 program of the EveryoneOn initiative. Access was a less pressing issue for these families than the lack of local skills-training and affordable tech support.

Digital Promise, a public-private partnership launched in 2011, is a model for relationship-based efforts toward educational equity. That initiative is now focused on engaging networks of innovative schools to scale up best practices that integrate research-based digital learning. It should be expanded to have a laser focus on opportunities for low-income families.

Our diverse nation faces considerable challenges to achieving educational equity. The urgent need for thoughtful, evidence-based innovation is clear. To give this year’s crop of preschoolers—the class of 2030—the very best chance of succeeding, we will need to change our approaches to build enduring home-school-community partnerships. Technology is not a magical elixir. But, if deployed wisely, these new tools can help strengthen the relationships that matter most in supporting children’s growth and success.

Now that digital technologies—and touch-screen tablets in particular—are finding their way into preschool and kindergarten classrooms, educators are faced with multiple questions about if, how, and when it is best to introduce them to young children. On September 3rd, the U.S. Department of Education brought together nearly 60 people from across the early childhood field to think through what would be of most help.

Flickr/ www.audio-luci-store.it

At least three needs became apparent throughout the day: Educators and parents need  succinct, research-based messages about what works best. Teachers and leaders need professional development on how to skillfully integrate technology into their teaching. And the app marketplace needs markers of quality informed by the science of child development.

The roundtable strategy session, hosted by the Office of Early Learning and the Office of Educational Technology, drew in experts from across the country, including developmental scientists, family engagement specialists, education school faculty, public media leaders, and philanthropic foundations.

It opened with remarks from U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who stressed the importance of helping young students who do not have the advantages of more well-off peers who are using technology to learn and create. “The stakes are high but the opportunities are amazing,” Duncan said.

Kwesi Rollins, director of leadership programs for the Institute for Educational Leadership, called on participants to consider technology in the context of the relationships between parents, educators, and community groups that are on the ground working with children everyday–particularly,” he said, “in communities that may need a little more help.”

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center and New America (Michael Levine and I) provided a brief presentation to show how the field has become more sophisticated about technology use over the past few years—but has much more work to do. [Slides to come soon.]

For example, the technology position statement from The National Association for the Education of Young Children and the Fred Roger’s Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media is guiding an increasing number of PreK-3rd educators, and new Screen Sense guidelines from Zero to Three are making an impact on how professionals and parents work with and care for infants and toddlers. Both statements emphasize that if and when digital media is to be used, be sure that it promotes joint engagement between children and adults, and among children with each other, to stimulate conversation, language development, and on-and-off-line exploration. The American Academy of Pediatrics, which is known for its blanket statement of “no screens” before age 2, also puts its focus on the importance of social interaction.

[Much of this guidance is discussed in the forthcoming book by me and Levine, Tap, Click, Read: Growing Readers in a World of Screens, which describes what it will take to harness technology appropriately and improve the odds for literacy learning for the next generation, especially for children without access to mentors and resources. The field needs to become more intentional and forward-thinking in helping educators and communities create environments that enable new literacies. The tapclickread.org website, launched last week, provides more details.]

A new set of reports from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources is also available to help the field:  Uses of Technology to Support Early Childhood Practice was published by the Administration for Children and Families last spring.

With these resources out there, several questions of the day centered on communication and outreach: Are educators and parents aware of these resources? Could the U.S. Department of Education play a role in dissemination and guidance? Could the guidance be boiled down into short, pithy statements that could take hold in classrooms, libraries, and households?  Some groups, such as Abriendo Puertas, are trying to reach parents with one-page “tech tips” (here in English and here in Spanish). Common Sense Media, an advocacy organization and website that rates children’s media, has also provided bite-sized “screen time” guidance for parents. What might be the equivalent for educators, and how might they guide new professional learning opportunities?

And meanwhile, could the app stores be nudged into marking their products in a way that could steer parents and educators to better resources?  For example, the Department of Ed has already published a guide for developers focused on the K-12 market.

Although the Obama Administration will be ending in less than 18 months, evidently it is not prepared to wind down yet. Libby Doggett, director of the Office of Early Learning, and Richard Culatta, director of the Office of Educational Technology, are actively seeking ideas and advice on how to make a difference on these issues in the coming year. The Sept 3 event sparked conversation on Twitter at #earlytech. Join in there if you have thoughts on how experts, stakeholder organizations, and federal agencies can help.

This post has also been published at EdCentral.org.

On August 12th, returning and new participants of the Aprendiendo Juntos Council gathered at Sesame Workshop for the 3rd annual working meeting of the consortium.

The Aprendiendo Juntos (Learning Together) Council is a multi-sector group of researchers, practitioners, media producers, and policy experts who seek to identify new models and practical strategies to improve educational outcomes for multicultural Hispanic-Latino families through the wise deployment of digital technologies. The group, which strives to take a strengths-based approach to optimizing educational outcomes for families, welcomes new participants and work that align with this objective.

Sylvia Acevedo, Presidential Commissioner, White House Initiative for Educational Excellence for Hispanics 
Photo by Robin Oelkers

This year, the AJC invited several new participants, including Olga Vasquez (UC San Diego), Gigliana Melzi (NYU), Maryann Marrapodi (HITN), Gay Mohrbacher (WGBH), Don Hernandez (CUNY Hunter College, SUNY Albany), Elisabeth Gee (ASU), Sinem Siyahhan (Cal State San Marcos), Silvia Lovato (Northwestern), Ernesto Villanueva (Chula Vista) and Sylvia Acevedo (White House Initiative for Educational Excellence for Hispanics). The day began with an introduction to our new participants’ work and an in-depth discussion of the implications of their work.

The Council then took time to reflect on the accomplishments to date of the AJC, discussing the reach and impact that its work has achieved thus far, and how to increase its impact in various fields. For instance, Vikki Katz of Rutgers University recently presented her Leveraging Technology work, which stemmed from a discussion at the first AJC meeting, at the U.S. Department of Education Office of English Language Acquisition in Washington, D.C. In addition, three AJC-related reports, including Aprendiendo en Casa, Connecting to Learn, and Digital Media and Latino Families, all written by AJC members, were released with mentions in NBC Latino, Ed Central, and Slate. It also prompted inquiries from Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro’s staff, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s staff. Andres Lombana Bermudez of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society shared a study that he is currently running in the Austin area with KLRU-PBS, which he claims is strongly impacted by the agenda and research objectives of the AJC.

Amber Levinson leads AJC members through an exercise highlighting emerging issues across disciplines.
Photo by Robin Oelkers.

In addition, Amber Levinson of Stanford/JGCC led AJC participants in an exercise that highlight issues emerging across several different fields. Each participant, even those participating remotely via live video stream, contributed to this conversation by writing topics they felt were important onto sticky notes or via email. Once everyone contributed, participants reorganized these topics into broader categories, including, but not limited to:

• Technology as a gatekeeper in a context of inequality.

• Outcomes of engagement with media.

• Promoting intergenerational learning in diverse Latino families.

• The role of play in engaging families with learning.

• Understanding the extreme multicultural diversity within the broad category of “Latino.”

• The role of language in use of media and technology.

• Strengthening home-school connections.

• How to effectively communicate research.

Meeting participants plan to use the list of generated categories to set an agenda for future research and AJC activities.

As a fairly young and still evolving council, a large portion of this year’s working meeting was dedicated to solidifying the identity and agenda of the AJC. This particular discussion, led by Ellen Wartella of Northwestern University, aimed to foster a strong sense of affiliation and purpose among the participants in order to tap into the full potential of the group as a whole.  As an assorted group of researchers, media practitioners, policymakers, funders, etc. with varying experiences, skill sets, and objectives, how can we most effectively rally together around a goal to make a collective and successful impact? How can the multi-sector work of the AJC be used as a model of collaboration for other collaborative work?

Finally, AJC participants set short term goals to continue the momentum of the day, then expressed a great amount of excitement and enthusiasm for the potential work that will continue to emerge from the group. We look forward to seeing more within the next year!

Learn more about the Aprendiendo Juntos Council and some of our recent reports.