Category Archives: Research

This article appeared in Physics Today, January 2021, page 26 and appears here with permission. From Elinor Wonders Why to Emily’s Wonder Lab, a multitude of fresh, dynamic programs have recently premiered that encourage children to channel their inner scientists. Between streaming services and television, today’s young people have more access to quality science programming than ever. But before there was Cyberchase, Wild Kratts, The Magic School Bus, or even Bill Nye the Science Guy, there was the show that started it all: 3-2-1 Contact. Premiering in 1980, 3-2-1…

The importance of literacy skills in our lives is clear – reading and language skills allow us to read signs, menus, and participate in everyday encounters. As adults, we rely on our literacy skills in the workplace to write reports, emails, or lesson plans. But it is also clear that critical “literacy” skills extend into the world of technology. And while digital literacy is increasingly becoming a component of the K-12 curriculum, we still lack sufficient understanding of how those…

When schools across the U.S. shut their doors in March 2020, families were confronted with the reality that our educational systems were not designed for remote instruction. Lack of access to the internet or devices, variation in teacher preparation, working parents, and uncertainty of how to best engage learners presented a range of obstacles. Adapting to the demands of learning from home required significant flexibility and resilience on the part of families, and the ways in which they were able…

This post originally appeared on the Digital Futures Commission website and appears here with permission. Like everything else in their life, children’s play has shifted online almost by default due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Parents, teachers and professionals who work with children, on the other hand, have scrambled to advise children on play with digital technologies; resources have been hard to come by, making it hard to figure out what free play in digital contexts looks like! So, what are the…

In Spring 2020, as schools around the United States were forced to turn to remote learning methods, a number of research teams around the country mobilized to study how families were adjusting to the pandemic. In July 2020, Dr. Brigid Barron and her team at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center convened a virtual workshop with research teams from Stanford, University of Washington, and the University of Michigan to explore innovative methods for studying…

In the 1960s, Joan Ganz Cooney published The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education, a report that would revolutionize television for children. Where others saw a “vast wasteland,” Cooney saw possibility, and from it, educational programming for children, like Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, was born. Half a century later, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Corporation for Public Broadcasting seek to carry forward this vision of programming with the By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences…

In the spring of 2020, schools across the country abruptly shut their doors, sending more than 50 million students home until further notice. Amidst the initial chaos and fear of the COVID-19 pandemic’s early days, caregivers were thrust into new roles as co-teachers as children struggled to adapt to the remote learning arrangements hurriedly set up by school districts in order to finish the academic year. How were families coping?  Researchers across a variety of disciplines recognized the urgent need…

You’ve probably seen studies showing that high-quality media can teach children new information. Two new studies from EDC and SRI Education tell us something more: Well-designed media can also teach children how to get information. Molly of Denali is a popular new PBS KIDS series focused on informational text. To succeed in school and life, children need to know how to get information, whether it’s reading a map, watching a how-to video, looking something up in an index, or identifying…

In 1968, a year before Sesame Street went on the air,  the fledgling Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) staff—including Joan Ganz Cooney, Robert Davidson, David Connell, Dr. Edward Palmer, Barbara Frengal, Samuel Gibbon, Anne Bower, James McConnell, and John Stone—conducted a seminar covering five key topic areas that Joan Ganz Cooney had identified in her extensive report to the Carnegie Corporation in 1966, The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Television. The seminars brought together leading experts in the fields of…

For nine months, we have been living in the midst of a pandemic that has thrust us all into a “new normal.” Teachers and students across the country have been thrown into an abrupt experiment in remote learning since the spring. Stark equity issues have come into view, and education leaders are worried about the long-term impact of learning loss, particularly among children from lower-income families. And the stress of isolation from peers and the lack of social interaction has…