Tag Archives: research

Imagine someone telling you that a new technology would be available in five years that has the potential to revolutionise childhood and early education. But the downside is that you will have to choose from among 80,000 possible options. This is the problem currently facing many parents. Following the invention of the iPad in 2010, by January 2015 there were 80,000 apps marketed as “educational” in the Apple App Store alone. We recently published a large-scale review of more than…

A Collaborative Experiment On January 23, 2015, researchers, educators, and digital media professionals spent the day at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka the d.school) to imagine how to better support the needs and interest-driven learning of families with children through digital media. The “Designing Media for Underserved Families” event, funded by the National Science Foundation’s Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies program, continued in the cross-sector collaborative spirit of the LIFE Center and the Families and Media consortium, in…

Last week Scholastic released the Kids and Family Reading Report,  its annual survey of children’s reading, and some of the results run counter to conventional wisdom about how much children love electronic books and desire independence. The responses provide hints of nostalgia for cuddling up on the couch turning pages of paper with their parents by their side. Parents responded to the survey via the Web, although the sample of respondents were first identified through random selection and contacted by…

Apps for social communication, learning, and play are a prominent part of nearly every family’s life today. Are they having a similar impact on how families and educators help their children learn to read? And if so, what kinds of apps are they using? As part of Seeding Reading: Investing in Children’s Literacy in a Digital Age, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and New America are analyzing the app marketplace to answer these questions. In 2012, we conducted a baseline…

Part 11 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning. Teachers have found many different ways of using digital games in the classroom. But what kind of games are these students playing? And how are teachers incorporating them in the classroom? Last year’s report from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, “Games For A Digital Age,” made the distinction between “short-form” and “long-form” learning games. Short-form games are designed to be played during a single class period. “They focus on a particular…

Part 7 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning. Games and learning advocates often come up against the video game stigma. Despite the fact that we’ve now seen decades of game play, and that a generation of gamers has grown up without a civilization collapsing, the bad reputation persists — and it’s mostly based around fear. News stories abound: games make kids hyper, violent, stupid, anti-social. It’s not only that people are generally wary of the unfamiliar, we also live…

Mathematics Education at the Edge provides opportunities to highlight and examine mathematics education research that is: 1) breaking new ground or on the cutting edge of innovative research and research methodologies; and 2) exploring issues with groups that are often positioned at the edge or periphery of educational research such as social justice, peace education, equity, and Indigenous education. This year’s conference takes place in Vancouver, British Columbia. For more information, please visit the PME website.

This spring, Oxford University Press released an important new contribution to the literature of media and developmental psychology with Media and the Well-Being of Children and Adolescents, edited by Amy B. Jordan and Daniel Romer. The volume examines the role that media play in the daily lives of families with children, from “traditional” media such as television and film as well as “new” digital media, including video games and mobile devices. Together, the research that comprises this volume provides an…

Thanks to some fairly frequent conference travel over the past few years, my understanding of what makes up “the world of kids, media, and technology” is constantly expanding and changing.  I consider myself incredibly privileged to have the vantage point that comes from traversing many difference academic- and industry-focused circles (just to name one way of slicing up this universe). This past week I attended CHI 2014 (the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), where the “academic…

Editor’s Note: Want to join the Joan Ganz Cooney Center team? Apply to be the 2016-2017 Cooney Center Fellow! We are accepting fellowship applications now through April 4, 2016. Former Cooney Center Research Fellow Jason Yip opens up and shares his experiences and offers advice for those who are interested in applying. Here are just a few of the reasons why you should think about applying to one of the premiere fellowships in children and digital media. The mission of the…