Ask Americans where kids are learning the skills they’ll need to participate in the 21st-century workforce, and you’ll likely hear the same answer over and over again: home or school.

That’s how most members of the U.S. public respond when asked about where learning takes place, according to the work we’ve done at the FrameWorks Institute, a communications think tank in Washington, DC. And that way of thinking applies to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education, our new report on public attitudes about STEM learning finds.

Until you specifically ask about them, you won’t hear much about the many other places where STEM learning takes place, such as libraries, museums, daycare, afterschool programs, and summer camps. And you certainly won’t hear about the need to connect and integrate—or “bridge”—the STEM learning that takes place in these informal learning environments.

School and home are, of course, primary locations for STEM education. When we think about STEM learning, many of us call up images in our heads—or draw on our own personal memories—of learning elementary math while baking cupcakes in the kitchen or the basics of biology while dissecting frogs in the school science lab (think Elliott from E.T.)

But we know that STEM learning takes place in many other locations, too. Immersion in these other settings is equally—if not more—valuable for sparking and building children’s interest and fluency in STEM. The opportunities are endless: Kids explore engineering when they participate in a “mad science” class at summer camp. They learn about biology, the environment, and what to do when things don’t go as planned by growing fruits and vegetables in a community garden. In afterschool programs, they learn about computer programming, and see how they can use math and technology to solve all sorts of real-world problems. And these are just a few of the many places where kids learn STEM.

Ensuring high quality STEM learning in these informal environments is also essential—not least because it’s fun. It enables kids to pursue STEM learning as it relates to their own interests and shows them the broad value and benefit of learning STEM (whether that’s planting a flower garden or forecasting the weather). And it allows for more flexible, hands-on, and no-test-no-stress learning. What’s more, when learning is meaningfully connected across all of these places, this deepens and advances children’s engagement and knowledge of STEM, and narrows disparities in different children’s access and interest in STEM learning opportunities.

Yet few people fully appreciate the need to prioritize STEM learning opportunities in other settings than school, or to connect and integrate, or bridge, these opportunities, FrameWorks found. This makes it difficult for advocates to build support for efforts to bridge STEM learning—wherever it takes place.

To help advocates make a stronger case for bridging STEM learning across environments, FrameWorks researchers interviewed experts and members of the public about education, STEM learning, and bridging STEM learning across various settings, and “mapped the gaps” between their views. Researchers found that Americans tend to:

• Think about people, not places. When the public thinks about STEM education, they think about people, such as teachers, and their characteristics and qualifications, but not about places. They rarely think about how the resources, design, and cultural norms of different places influence learning.
• Focus exclusively on home and school. When thinking about learning environments, people think about home and school, but not other sites, such as libraries, museums, daycare, afterschool programs, or summer camps. People tend to see home and school as locations where kids learn separate and distinct skills (values at home and academics at school) and in a sequential order, with home-based learning serving as a precursor to school-based learning.
• View technology as an unhealthy distraction. Experts see technology as a powerful learning tool, but members of the public see it as a distraction and worry about its effects on kids’ social connections. As a result, the public sees technology as something that must be restricted and curtailed—rather than subsidized and supported.
• See connecting learning across settings as repeating and reviewing school-based content. Experts argue that connecting and integrating STEM learning across environments means advancing and deepening children’s interest and knowledge—learning in different environments is equally important to, and should be both different from and build on the learning that takes in each. The public, however, thinks connecting learning environments means simply repeating and reviewing what children learn at school—learning outside of school is thought to be secondary to learning at school, and does not always or necessarily have to help kids learn other skills or content than what they learn at school. They don’t readily see the unique value of STEM learning in informal settings or how connecting it to school-based content advances or deepens children’s STEM learning beyond what they may learn at school.

These and other findings are summarized in “Crossing the Boundaries: Mapping the Gaps between Expert and Public Understandings of Bridging STEM Learning Environments.”

Supported by the Oath, Heising-Simons, and Bezos Family foundations, the report is part of the Families Learning Across Boundaries (FamLAB) project led by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and in partnership with FrameWorks, New York University, and Stanford University.

It builds on previous research by FrameWorks into how to frame STEM education and digital media and learning—and shows how advocates can make a stronger case for STEM learning, wherever, and whenever, it happens, and ultimately, how we can build a stronger, more prosperous society.

 

Allison Stevens is senior writer and editor at the FrameWorks Institute, a communications think tank in Washington, DC. Kevin Levay is a researcher at FrameWorks.

Researchers and practitioners have long known that when it comes to digital media for kids, quality is key. But what does it mean for a children’s app to be good or bad? How do specific features and design decisions affect the children who engage with them? If parents want to find high-quality content, what exactly should they be looking for?

As part of a team of collaborators at Microsoft Research, the University of Michigan, and the University of Washington, I have been working to find out. In one study, we wanted to understand exactly what happens when kids and parents play with toys together—and what happens when those toys are replaced by screens. By taking a close look at how children and parents respond to specific components of their favorite apps, and comparing these responses to their play behaviors with other toys, we hoped to better understand how specific types of apps shape young children’s play.

We set up a play room in one of our labs and filled it with ordinary toys—things like Legos, crayons and paper, dolls, books, and board games. We asked preschoolers between the ages of 4 and 6 to hang out in the lab with their parent, and we watched what they did. We also asked these same families to play in the lab again, but this time with their favorite tablet games instead of toys.

What changed? Well, quite a bit. When only toys were available, children were more likely to engage their parents in conversation, and they were more likely to reply when their parents spoke to them. With toys as stimuli, parents and kids spent more time building on each other’s ideas, paying attention to the same thing, and engaging in experiences together. When we gave kids a tablet, they were more likely to play on their own, trail off in the middle of a sentence, and ignore comments from their parent. Once the child had a tablet, the parent was less likely to give input or participate in play, and more likely to look bored or wander away.

So is there no hope for apps? Well, as we looked closer, we saw that the kind of app the child chose to use made a big difference. If the app demanded continual interaction (think runner games or games with lots of special effects), children would let the app direct their attention and interrupt their interactions with their parent. But apps that followed the child’s pace (think drawing apps, or exploratory games where the player wanders in an open-ended world) allowed the child take control of their own attention. When children played with these kinds of apps, they would explain what was happening on screen to their parent, respond to their parent’s questions, and invite the parent to share the experience.

Most of the apps children played with were designed for one person to the use the tablet alone in a single orientation. And in these cases, children hunched over the device in a solitary position, often making it impossible for the parent to play too or even see what was happening. But occasionally, children played tablet games that were symmetrical and could be used by multiple people from all sides of the device. In these moments, the way children oriented to the tablet suddenly changed. They set it out on the floor in front them, in a way that invited the parent to participate. This orientation was exactly how families interacted with traditional toys: they spread out Legos, crayons, puzzle pieces, and board games in a shared space between them that made it easy for them to engage in joint attention and collaborative play.

In another study, we evaluated different versions of a video player app for tablets. Children could use it to construct a playlist of YouTube videos to watch, and some of the time, the app would auto-play additional videos when the child’s planned playlist ended. Some of the time, the playlist would end on schedule. When the playlist ended as expected, children regularly took charge of putting the tablet away, often announcing to their parents that they were done and describing what they were going to do next,even though they knew they could opt to watch more videos, if they wanted to. When the playlist ended and new videos immediately started auto-playing, children’s responses were quite different. They hung around and watched more content, they were less likely to turn off the device on their own, less likely to talk about what they were going to do next, and more likely to need a parent to intervene. The content and the options available to kids were the same, but with the auto-play mechanic designed into the experience, children’s behavior was notably different.

Apps can provide children and their families with experiences that are both enjoyable and valuable, but many of today’s commercially available apps for preschoolers come with downsides. They hijack children’s attention, undermine their autonomy and self-regulation, and interrupt interpersonal interactions. But it is just as clear that it doesn’t have to be this way. Designers have the power to create experiences that respect children’s attention and autonomy, and support families in integrating digital media into daily life on their own terms. Apps that support multiple players and are accessible from all sides are more conducive to shared and collaborative play. Apps that can be interrupted and let the user control the action are more conducive to dialog and interpersonal engagement. Apps that provide natural stopping points and transition support make it easier for children to self-regulate their media use, while apps that forever auto-play more content make it harder. Designers of children’s media should hold themselves to a high standard and create play experiences that enhance daily life without insisting that they dominate it. And parents should demand this kind of quality and vote with their dollar.

 

Alexis Hiniker is an Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Washington Information School. She studies the ways that technologies manipulate and exploit their users and how to design more respectful alternatives, particularly for children under 5. Her past and current work has been supported by Mozilla, Sesame Workshop, Microsoft Research, Facebook, and more. Her scholarship has been covered by The New York Times, TIME Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Good Morning America, and many other media outlets. She holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Harvard, a master’s degree in Learning, Design, and Technology from Stanford, and a PhD in Human Centered Design and Engineering from the University of Washington.

Just a few months after the publication of Children and Families in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2018), Alexia Raynal presented original and previously-published research from the Families and Media (FAM) Research Consortium at the 2018 American Education Research Association (AERA) annual meeting. In the following article, Alexia presents key highlights from her roundtable discussion on Equity and Learning Technologies with Dr. Vikki Katz (Rutgers University) and Dr. Yasmine El Masri (Oxford University) on May 17, 2018.  

 

Some academic circles recognize a commonly held that children are “digital natives” who learn how to use technology just by being exposed to it. But clear differences in how students benefit from technology depending on adult engagement —as demonstrated  across AERA sessions— reveal that the resources and guidance adults provide in children’s use of technology greatly impact children’s learning outcomes. This issue of engagement constitutes an important dimension of the question that my colleagues and I set out to explore: how can formal and informal education spaces adopt learning technologies in equitable ways?

Equitable technology integration within the classroom can be defined as a school’s ability to provide students with the skills and tools they need to successfully utilize technology for learning. Different students have different needs as they reach for the same goal. For example, students who are born to households where technological literacy is limited, who attend schools with limited technology funding, or whose parents are disproportionately concerned about technology use need a much more robust support system to successfully adopt technologies than students whose parents are tech-fluent and who feel confident of their ability to protect children online. The difference is even greater in more extreme contexts. Children who lack access to a stable home, as is the case for the Syrian refugee children in Dr. El Masri’s study (details below), need even greater supports.

The following national and international situations exemplify the interaction of engagement and equitable technology integration in the education research that my colleagues and I conduct with diverse socioeconomically disadvantaged populations.

Responding to classroom change in three U.S. school districts: Dr. Katz opened our roundtable discussion by presenting findings from a qualitative study of low-income, Mexican-origin families in three U.S. communities that sought to explain (a) how parents respond to the introduction of technology into their children’s classroom, and (b) what efforts they made to support children’s learning at home. The findings—which constitute chapter 6 of Children and Families—list three affordances that parents associated with students’ school technology use: personalization, interactivity, and skills development. But while parents recognized the potential of technology to prepare students for an increasingly digitized economy, they also acknowledged the pitfalls. Too much personalization in digital technologies can reduce face-to-face learning. Too much interactivity can distract students. And too much technology skill development reduces the time students spend developing reasoning skills. The tipping point between enabling classroom technology affordances and producing negative side effects lies in a school’s ability to leverage adult engagement and to design equitable and responsive technology programs from the onset.

Linking adult concerns and student use of technology: I followed Dr. Katz’s presentation by offering lessons from my own analysis of a sub-sample of Dr. Katz’s project where I explore the relationship between parents’ concerns about technology use and students’ use of technology. My analysis asks: given that socioeconomically disadvantaged parents already feel behind in their ability to support their children’s online learning, how do these parents’ concerns about technology impact students’ access to meaningful technology use? I respond to this question by comparing two communities and exploring how schools with stricter technology rules relieve parents’ concerns at the cost of limiting students’ comfort with technology. To avoid this unintended negative impact, I encourage schools to design developmentally-sensitive technology integration programs that properly support students’ ability to protect themselves while encouraging them to continue learning online. Without properly accounting for the needs of students, an equitable integration of learning technologies is not possible.

Using technology to overcome the language barrier: Dr. El Masri wraped up the discussion by illustrating the linguistic and technological barriers that prevent Syrian children relocated in Lebanon from accessing learning technologies. In her study, Dr. El Masri sought to examine the extent to which technology can help displaced Syrian students learn science and overcome linguistic barriers by facilitating lessons in their native language. By helping educators understand the effectiveness of making science lessons available not only in Arabic but in ways that retain children’s attention, El Masri’s findings highlight the importance of tailoring technology tools to meet the specific and contextualized needs of underserved populations.

I am deeply thankful for the opportunity to engage with fellow researchers across AERA divisions to discuss the pressing concerns of education in the digital age. I realize that by exploring the ways in which diverse learning spaces adopt digital learning technologies, my colleagues and I re-contextualize the AERA’s annual meeting interest in “The Dreams, Possibilities and Necessities of Public Education.” The conversations we shared with participants in the Equity and Learning Technologies roundtable made it clear to me that in order to avoid yet a new kind of digital divide—one in which differences in online experiences amplify risks in already vulnerable populations—schools must carefully consider the specific needs of their communities. Schools’ ability to tailor responsive technology programs is an important step in closing—rather than amplifying—persistent learning disparities that disproportionally affect socioeconomically disadvantaged students.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This partial transcript of the App Fairy podcast has been edited for length and clarity. Visit appfairy.org for more information about Tinybop.

Carissa Christner: Hello and welcome to the App Fairy podcast! Today we’re going to be talking with the makers of Tinybop. These guys make great apps for school-age kids, a slightly older audience than some of the other app makers that I’ve spoken with.

For this episode, we’re going to try something a little bit different. About a year ago I was totally enchanted when I heard an interview with Raul Gutierrez, Founder and CEO of Tinybop by Kabir Seth of the Diversity Sauce podcast, and they were kind enough to let us share part of that interview. Diversity Sauce has some excellent content, and I definitely recommend listening. I’ll also follow up that segment with a mini interview I did with Raul recently.

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Kabir Seth: [From what I’ve read] your road to Tinybop was a roundabout path. Can you tell me that story?

Raul Gutierrez: I have always been interested in children’s books and kid’s media. The one thing that my parents really spoiled us with was books—we didn’t have a ton of toys, but we had a lot of books. I always loved the weirdness of children’s books, and when I had my own kids, they became my laboratory. We had more children’s books than was really reasonable. I couldn’t wait to expose my kids to all these cool titles.

Once we started to have iPhones and iPads in the house… you know, my kids were really the first generation to see those or play with those as kids. My oldest son was born in 2004 and just when he was becoming cognizant of the world was when the first iPads and iPhones came out. Instantly, they became his favorite toy. He called them “the everything machine” (which is actually now the name of one of our products) because for him they were just that—they were tools, they were toys, they were passive entertainment, they were active entertainment. They did all of these things.

And I realized that I was kind of threatened by the screen, especially in context of kids. I felt that these devices were important and I wanted to understand them. Not so much as a business or anything, but to understand what my kid was doing, why was screen time was so powerful for him, what gave it this draw. What I found, ultimately, was that it’s this incredible form because you’re actually touching something, and then something’s happening back. It’s incredibly responsive.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought about my own childhood. I grew up in a small East Texas town that’s not known for anything good. It’s changed a lot and things have gotten much better, but back then it was really isolated. I thought of it as an island. You didn’t have access to the outside world. But my escape was the library. I would go to the children’s section, and they had sets of children’s encyclopedias that gave you context for the world. I loved the Childcraft library series—they had one book on space, one book on mammals, one book on dinosaurs.

Reading my way through that library, serendipitously, I discovered what I was interested in. I discovered that there was this other world outside of where I was living. What I’ve realized [as an adult now] is that with the iPhone and iPad, Apple and Google have created these amazing distribution systems that can reach everywhere. You can create content that can touch all of those little islands, and the kids who are out there. 

The Internet performs largely the same function, connecting people to all these things, but with a horrible interface for a six-year-old. You have to know what you’re looking for, you have to be motivated by the subject. But with a series of apps that’s very, very affordable—and we try to make them even more affordable for schools—a parent can buy the whole series and explain the world. It’s that same serendipitous sensation, not exactly an encyclopedia, but a way to understand various subjects.

I wanted to make them as beautiful as the children’s books that I’d always loved and also just as weird. Because childhood is weird. The way that children see the world is a little strange. There’s so much children’s media that is just extremely straightforward, with the bright colors and the cute characters, which is not necessarily how kids see the world.

From the beginning, we wanted Tinybop to be inclusive, because we wanted to reach these islands of people (and you can be in an island in a big city, just if you come from a bad economic situation, or maybe you don’t have a house full of books). So our question was, how do we, at a very low price, provide a lot of great quality media. Then our next challenge, of course, was to get people to actually download them.

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KS:  You’ve mentioned that your design philosophy is sort of a “design for quiet” as opposed to designing with gamification or badges. Was that a result of research?

RG: I started asking myself, why does screen time bother me so much as a parent? I would see that many so called “kid’s apps” were designed, essentially, to overstimulate kids. They were using gambling algorithms or gaming loops that left kids really jangled. And kids, especially at that age, every parent knows they can be overstimulated. When a kid is overstimulated, they’re often foul tempered and in a bad mood. The minute you take the iPad away, they’re just awful.

I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to do what a good book does, what a good science experiment does. We wanted to create “explorable explanations.” So each app in the Explorer’s Library is essentially a working model of the thing we’re trying to show. For example, with the Human Body app, it’s a little model of the human body: you feed it, food goes in one end, and comes out the other. You tap the eye, and we use the camera to show how it works, it blinks. It’s accurate, not dumbed down for kids. There are medical schools that are using the app [with the labels that turn on and off] as a way to help people learn various parts of the body.

The hope is that, in creating this quiet experience, that doesn’t have a soundtrack running behind it and doesn’t have a gamification loop, that you’ll slow kids down long enough that they’ll want to explore. And that’s where the slight touch of weirdness comes in. Because you know, we have to give kids a reason to explore these things. I think that, when we do our job, the output of the apps is not that your kid knows everything about the subject—it’s that your child will ask you questions.

The real goal of that Explorer’s Library series is to start a conversation between parents, teachers, and kids. When we’ve done our job, kids are full of questions. One of my favorite negative comments that we got in the App Store was when somebody gave us a one-star review, saying, “I leave my kid at home with the iPad, and when I come home she’s just full of questions.” And I’m like, this is the point (KS: It’s not a babysitter.) Right. I want you to talk to your kids. That’s really the goal.

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CC: Wasn’t that a great interview? If you’d like to hear the rest of it, be sure to check out Episode 4 of the Diversity Sauce podcast. For now, I’ve got Raul Gutierrez on the phone with me for a few follow-up questions. Welcome to the App Fairy podcast, Raul!

One of the big questions we focus on is joint media engagement. You mentioned in your interview with Kabir the story of a negative review from someone upset that their child was asking too many questions after using your app—that’s clearly a great way to encourage joint media engagement. Can you talk more about elements of your app designed specifically to encourage connections between people?

RG: From the beginning, our apps have had an inquiry-based philosophy around them. We try to show rather than tell, and we try to embed learning in interactions. Rather than having a page of text, we’ll have the app do something that reveals the meaning.

Oftentimes, the thing that is happening is new to kids, like if they’re looking at something in space or the inside of an elephant. So they will logically and naturally have questions. And we want those questions to come out! We designed a series of handbooks for parents and educators that answer a lot of those questions, and go through the learning goals of the app. For me, that’s the most fun part of the apps. It’s sitting with a kid and asking them what they’re seeing.

CC: You mentioned your handbooks and I want to make sure listeners have found them, because they are amazing. They are probably the best resources for any apps that I’ve seen, offering ways to not just dig deeper into the app, but to also learn more information about the topic at hand. And they’re available in so many different languages too!

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RG: I think there a lot of people that have a sort of knee jerk reaction to any screen, thinking of them all as equivalent or that anything on a screen is instantly negative. But I look at apps like I do any other medium. There are good books, and there are books that are probably a waste of time. There are apps that are thoughtful and there are others that aren’t. Apps can really add to the way kids see, experience, and understand the world.

 

Listen to the full podcast.