Tag Archives: preschool

As people rush to predict what’s coming next, David Kleeman reflects on Joan Ganz Cooney, and how some things about childhood will never change.

You may have heard that television programming in the 1960s was called a “vast wasteland.” by then-FCC Chairman Newton Minow. From the beginning, Lloyd Morrisett and I were both convinced that television – which was capturing the attention of children as nothing else was – did have the power to educate as well as to entertain and we set out to prove it. It was back in 1966 when I wrote my original report, The Potential Uses of Television in…

This guest post by Anusha Subramanyam, PhD, BCBA-D and Tammy Kwan of Cognitive Toybox describes results from a pilot study in which Cognitive ToyBox, a game-based assessment program, was implemented in preschool classrooms to help teachers monitor their students’ progress.   Early childhood education programs require accurate, ongoing assessment to help students reach their school readiness goals. Our recent report, The Promise of Game-Based Assessment in Early Childhood Education, describes the challenge of current assessment systems and opportunities where direct assessment…

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…

In many ways, the audience for PEEP and the Big Wide World is what you might expect. Every day, thousands of preschoolers, parents, and educators log on to this award-winning public media project to explore math and science—by watching videos, playing games, and finding hands-on activities they can explore in their own homes and neighborhoods. But PEEP’s audience is unique in one important way: more than 20% of PEEP’s users are Spanish-speaking. This wasn’t always the case. The growth of…

This post was originally published on the Fred Rogers Center Blog and appears here with permission. This week my colleagues at Education Development Center and SRI International and I are releasing findings from our Prekindergarten Transmedia Mathematics Study. This research is part of Ready to Learn, a partnership between the US Department of Education, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and PBS. The basic premise of Ready to Learn is that it marshals public media resources in support of 2- to…