Tag Archives: research

This transcript of the Into the Digital Future podcast provides has been edited for clarity. Please listen to the full episode here and learn more about the series here. Alicia is the Head of Kids and Families Strategy at YouTube, where she focuses on helping children and their parents and caregivers realize their rights to more safely learn, connect, and play online. She was previously the Public Policy Lead for Kids and Families at Google, where she worked on issues…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Billions of people around the world play video games, making gaming one of the most popular forms of entertainment today. Yet while we know there are many positive aspects to video games for learning and play, many still worry that they could also be bad for us. Video games have been accused of making players violent, isolated, dumb, or addicted. But what does academic research actually say? This is what I discuss in my most recent book, The Psychology of…

It’s that time of year again – time to vote for your favorite SXSW EDU 2021 panels. We’re disappointed not to be able to share tacos with you in Austin, but we’re very excited to talk about why tweens and teens are public media’s “missing middle” audience, the challenges of reaching these kids, and potential opportunities for public media. And, as if that weren’t enough for you, we’re having this conversation with public media luminaries Deb Sanchez, Senior Vice President,…