Are New Media a Boon to Young Children’s Education?

Children are Using Interactive Digital Media More and at Younger Ages

Patrick was still in pre-K when he asked if he could visit a place called Club Penguin--that is, a place on the computer he'd seen at a friend's house. His mom said okay, just for a visit. Mom recognized Club Penguin as one of those virtual worlds she had heard about where kids develop their own online identities, interact with each other and play games.

She wasn't sure Club Penguin was appropriate for a preschooler who, after all, couldn't read. By the time Patrick was in kindergarten, however, he visited Club Penguin regularly--with mom's assistance on the reading part. Before long, he was impressing his parents with his ability to navigate the penguin world on his own and even read some of the penguin dialogue.

Educators know when children are engaged, they learn more. Interactive digital media are engaging more children at younger ages. How much they are learning from this exposure remains an open question since many products are developed without benefit of the principles of child development and little research into their educational effects exists.

Children often encounter interactive media first in the form of digitally enabled toys and story books. By the time they're in preschool, the majority can use a computer mouse and can even load CDs and DVDs in the family computer. And since most television shows children watch now have web sites, they are gravitating to the Internet at younger ages.

In his recent study of computer use in families with young children, Warren Buckleitner, editor of Children's Technology Review, found that while the digital world offers a wealth of opportunity for young children to play and learn, the quality of children's media varied widely. Some web sites children visited appeared to have little educational value, existing solely to extend a brand name. They often frustrated children with commercial messages the kids were ill-prepared to understand. Two of the 15 children he observed accessing the web were under the age of 3.

While perhaps not typical, this doesn't come as a surprise to Carly Shuler, who studies digital media at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. She says the trend toward younger kids using digital media is moving quickly. The age at which children are using digital media for gaming dropped from 8.1 years old in 2005 to 6.7 years old in 2007.

All this technology competing for a bigger share of children's minds raises hopes and worries. The hope, of course, is that, properly designed and developed, new media can be an even more powerful educational tool than traditional one-way media such as educational television. The thinking goes that, in the hands of skilled developers grounded in child development, new media can go a long way toward replicating the dynamic of a motivated, engaged pupil interacting with a skilled, even entertaining teacher.

Educational Potential
"We think the potential is great and largely untapped," says Michael Levine, executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. He says most new media products for young children come to market with little or no input from child development experts and therefore there's little understanding of the educational science (if any) underlying them. (See Newsmaker, page 9.)

That sounds familiar to author and former New York Times reporter Lisa Guernsey. As a young mother, she took it upon herself to find out if the videos she was using to calm her colicky infant daughter were helping or harming her child. She had come to rely on the calming effects of the Baby Mozart video when she needed short breaks from care giving. It wasn't long before she learned about the sweeping recommendation published by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) that children under age 2 be exposed to no "screen time."

Guernsey was struck by the dilemma she and other mothers faced. On the one hand, companies were bombarding them with claims about the educational value of their videos for children as young as two months of age. On the other, the pediatricians were recommending no exposure.

"I found myself on a quest to learn everything I could about screen media and children…," she writes in her book Into the Minds of Babes. What she found was that the AAP based its recommendation less on any science directly pertaining to the effects of screen time on young children and more on a "do no harm" approach to exposing kids who are too young to speak for themselves.

Guernsey discovered that with rare exception, the companies selling baby videos were relying on anecdotal testimony from parents for their marketing claims and not research. Not only that but the way the videos presented subject matter often paid little heed to basic principles of teaching young children such as repetition and reinforcement.

In 2005, a Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation report concluded there was "a paucity of published research documenting the impact of educational media on very young children." Guernsey concluded that while there is no research to support the notion that even limited amounts of screen time harm children under age 2, the claims of cognitive stimulation made by those selling baby videos should be taken with a grain of salt.

Buckleitner says that's not the case for preschool-aged children. In 2007, he surveyed what research existed for a report he wrote for Children Now titled The Effects of Interactive Media on Preschoolers' Learning. The research findings varied, with some showing positive effects of interactive media on cognition and others showing no effects or no harm. Whether an interactive product supported children's learning depended less on the medium itself and more on the content.

Earlier this year, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center issued a report based on interviews with 60 leaders from fields that included education media, digital development, literacy, child development, and education policy. Titled The Power of Pow! Wham! and written by Rima Shore of Bank Street College of Education, it makes the case that digital media have the potential to provide powerful learning opportunities for young people.

Shore recommends a national initiative to coordinate research and development efforts to provide a resource for parents, educators, policymakers, and the public.

A similar sentiment was voiced by experts at a seminar at the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children's Media. They said guidelines for media literacy should be integrated into early childhood learning standards, teacher preparation program standards, and standards for accreditation/licensing of early childhood settings.

In the meantime, digital media for children remain a grab bag of good, not-so-good, and outright inappropriate offerings. With most top-selling products for young children making claims not substantiated by research, it falls upon educators and parents to use judgment in selecting media. Guernsey recommends using what she calls the "Three C's" approach to evaluating media, first looking at content, then looking at context, and finally, looking at the needs of the individual child. (See "Three C's," below.)

Buckleitner says parents and educators should respect the power of new media for children. He calls them the "800-pound gorilla"--or in Patrick's case, an 800-pound penguin--that didn't exist in the playroom 10 or 20 years ago.

Sidebars
Five Market Trends Shaping Children's Offerings

In her report D is for Digital, Carly Shuler identified five market trends shaping children's offerings:

Virtual Worlds – Simulated environments (such as Club Penguin and Webkinz) that children inhabit and interact with one another through digital representations of themselves known as avatars.

Casual Games – Makers of gaming platforms such as Nintendo's popular Wii are shifting some of their focus to casual gaming.

Video on the Web – Spurred by the success of video web sites such as YouTube, media companies have developed youth-oriented video destinations such as Kid Videos.

Youth-Generated Content – User-generated content such as blogs, wikis and podcasts, which originated with adults, are finding applications in children's media.

Media Convergence – Television shows, radio broadcasts and movies are no longer confined to the television set, radio or theater. People can receive them on computers and portable media, enabling a multi-platform delivery of educational programs.

"Three C's" Approach to Kid's Media

Content – What is the basic premise of show? How is it designed? Does it have repetition? Are new words defined by pointing or labeling?

Context – Who is interacting with the child? How do parents talk about what's on the screen? Is the child learning through a game, then applying that in another activity? Is the child telling stories about what he or she has experienced?

Child – How much stimulation can this child take? What scares her? What types of media trigger the most curious questions, playful reenactments, engagement and joy?