Tag Archives: research

Watch a group of young children in a community garden. They’ll dig in the soil, find and play with earthworms and insects, plant seeds in patches of sunlight, and come back to watch them sprout, grow, and bear fruit. With a little help, these kids can be doing more than simply playing in the dirt. They can be learning the beginnings of environmental science and plant biology and practicing critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. Working alongside teachers trained in early STEM…

Last week, Sandhya Nankani wrote about the White House Conference on gender and diversity in toys. Here she describes the toy industry’s efforts to break down existing stereotypes and create new narratives that empower girls.   The toy world is abuzz with the recent launch of the newest Barbie doll, modeled after Misty Copeland, the first black female principal dancer at the American Ballet Theater. The doll is a part of Barbie’s Sheroes collection, which celebrates female heroes who “like…

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…

Jason Yip was a Research Fellow here at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center in 2013-14. He is currently a Senior Fellow here as well as an assistant professor at the University of Washington. We asked him to share some highlights from his time here, as well as what he is doing now. Tell us a little bit about some of the activities you worked on while you were a Cooney Center Fellow. Sure, some of the highlights of my time…

How on earth do I describe a dream come true? How do I explain what brought me here, why I sought out this special place? I’ll start with a quote from Fred Rogers: Those of us in children’s television are chosen to be servants. We are chosen to help meet the deeper needs of those who watch and listen, day and night. What he said in 1999 still applies today, and to much more than just children’s television. According to…

We’re pleased to introduce our newest Cooney Center Fellow, Elisabeth McClure.  She has just joined us this month from Georgetown University, where she is completing her PhD in Human Development and Public Policy. Elisabeth’s graduate work was inspired by research about the video deficit effect, which finds that children under two years old learn better from live interaction with people than from video presentations. Her work on video chat with children under two years old included a family media usage…

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…