Tag Archives: covid-19

In October 2022, The Nation’s Report Card revealed that fourth- and eighth-grade students assessed in the 2021-22 school year experienced the largest declines in mathematics performance in the program’s history. These national declines highlight the unprecedented learning crisis facing students following the COVID-19 pandemic. Even before the pandemic, gaps in mathematics achievement of students with the highest and lowest performance were already widening. In September 2023, the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the Institute of Education Sciences…

Can you feel the excitement? The buzz of conference-planning is in the air! We’re zooming with friends and colleagues across the country—and beyond!—as we make plans to attend our first in-person event in more than two years. The Cooney Center is thrilled to participate in this year’s ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego. We’re organizing and hosting some panels with our colleagues at Sesame Workshop, launching a project, and looking forward to talking about education, innovation, and equity! Come find us…

For kids during a pandemic, “down on the corner is up on the server.” Join @davidkleeman on the #IntotheDigitalFuture podcast with @jordosh & @laurahiggins_ to hear about some of the kids’ media trends of the past year. @dubit

On October 26, 2021, the Cooney Center hosted Learning at Home While Under-Connected and the Role of Public Media, a discussion about learning at home and digital inequality, and how public media stations can help within their local communities.  Vikki Katz (Rutgers University) presented key research findings from Learning at Home While Under-Connected: Lower-Income Families During the COVID-19 Pandemic, which follows up on 2016’s Opportunity for All? Technology and Learning in Lower-Income Families to uncover the perspectives of lower-income parents…

Learning at Home While Under-Connected: Lower-Income Families During the COVID-19 Pandemic follows up on 2016’s Opportunity for All? Technology and Learning in Lower-Income Families to uncover the perspectives of lower-income parents with children ages 3 to 13.  In March and April 2021, researchers Vikki Katz and Victoria Rideout led a national survey of more than 1,000 parents. The report delves into the experiences that these families had while many children were learning at home during a time when many school buildings…

The following is an excerpt from Gaming SEL: Games as Transformational to School and Emotional Learning by Matthew Farber and appears here courtesy of publisher Peter Lang.   In the early 1980s, video gaming often meant arcades, quick experiences designed to eat kids’ quarters. These games provided quick thrills, little in the way of nuanced emotion. Similarly, film was also fairly basic when introduced at the turn of the 20th century. Famously (at least according to legend), in 1895, the…

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…

PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs (SRL) launched On Our Minds with Noah+Zion, a limited-run podcast series on teen mental health this spring. Over a series of five episodes, 16-year-old hosts Noah Konevitch of Lebanon, Pennsylvania and Zion Williams of Clinton Township, Michigan, explored various mental health challenges affecting today’s teens, and shared coping mechanisms from mental health experts. The Cooney Center caught up with Noah and Zion this summer to find out what they learned about making a podcast for the…

When schools shuttered in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers from dozens of institutions leaped at the opportunity to investigate how the sudden lockdown would alter formal and informal learning as we had come to know it in the United States. Many were as eager to figure out how to study the evolution of learning at home at a time when it was no longer safe to spend time observing or interviewing learners in person. In our symposium…

Throughout the past year, everyone has experienced pandemic stress. But parents have been particularly vulnerable because of the additional work associated with managing children, especially for those parents trying to continue to work at their jobs. There have been many new studies about the ways that pandemic stress has impacted parents’ mental health. While people turn to a variety of tools to cope with pandemic stress, our study focuses on using entertainment media, specifically video games, as a coping tool. Using…