QuickStudies

QuickStudies are informal field explorations of learning around digital media. New forms of digital media are hitting the market and entering homes at a faster rate than academic researchers can study them. By the time studies are completed and findings are published, these media may already be yesterday’s news. As an alternative to the traditional research cycle, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center has developed QuickStudies as a means of quickly exploring new media with the purpose of determining which research questions to pursue later on in more formal investigations with partnering institutions.

QuickStudies can be designed and run within a matter of weeks versus months. Flexible study protocols will be drawn up based upon a set of basic questions, and can take the form of interviews with kids and/or their parents, observations of kids performing tightly-structured or more freeform tasks on digital devices, and so on. QuickStudies take place at local extended learning institutions that have lots of kids (and their parents) in our target audiences and, critically, blanket human subjects agreements, which allow the Cooney Center to run investigations with a mid-size number of participants, safely and ethically each time.

The Cooney Center launched its QuickStudy series with the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI), where together we ran a set of studies on e-books with museum visitors.

Stay tuned for more information on upcoming QuickStudies.