Friday, October 26, 2007

My blog is now at blog.lisaguernsey.com It's time for the big switch: my blog has a new home -- and a new name: Media Minds at blog.lisaguernsey.com. Come on over for a visit.   11:31:31 AM    comment []

	Monday, October 01, 2007

New data on what happens with heavy TV use at young ages The questions continue to hang out there, like fog that won't dissipate: Do attention disorders have something to do with TV-watching at young ages? Is screen time making children fat? What happens to the social skills of preschoolers who watch a lot of television? Almost weekly, a study appears in a medical or scientific journal to help us piece together what is really going on. The problem is, science is a bit-by-bit process, results are messy, and attempts to replicate results are even trickier. Here are three of the latest puzzle pieces to arrive on the scene:  Today, Pediatrics released a report that shows a relationship between behavior problems and heavy TV-watching (2 hours/day or more) at 2-and-a-half and 5-and-a-half years of age. But here's the good news: If children had been heavy TV users at age 2 but not at age 5, the effect went away. (As an aside: At that age, kindergarten or pre-K programs take up a big part of the daily routine. In interviews I've conducted with middle-class parents, many have told me that the day is just too busy for much more than an hour of TV anyway.) No link appeared between attention problems and heavy TV use at age 2-and-a-half. But having a TV in the bedroom at 5-and-a-half was associated with sleep problems and less emotional reactivity. Note that the study didn't make any distinction between the types of TV shows watched. In other words, we don't know if they were violent, commercial-infused, adult-focused, children-oriented or educational programs.  Last month, also in Pediatrics, the question of attention-problems and TV-viewing got more focused treatment. That report is worth reading closely because it tries to answer what has been a confounding question left hanging by previous studies: Isn't it possible that children with attention problems had those problems before they ever were exposed to TV? The authors, led by Carl Erik Landhuis at the University of Otago in New Zealand, found that when they controlled for attention problems in early childhood, they still found an effect of TV viewing by the time they were teenagers. This was based on 2 hours of TV-watching each weekday, which many define as heavy use, and was particularly robust among those who watched more than 3 hours a day in early childhood. The study made no mention, however, of what kinds of programs these children were watching. And we still have only an association -- a link -- that may be due to factors that are not directly TV-related. For example, could it be that TV is displacing too much of the run-around, outdoor playtime these children need? The third study came out last week in  the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity. It offered some of the first evidence that computer use in preschool children might be related to adiposity (roughly translated, how much fat is in a skinfold). Obesity and heavy-TV viewing was also connected, a finding that matches what has appeared in other studies of preschoolers. Getting at exactly what is causing the obesity -- is it just about the lack of exercise? could it the junk-food commercials? --  is a knot still to be untangled. 9:47:52 AM    comment []

	Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Think of screentime as yogurt I've been mulling an odd analogy in my head, and I wonder what you think. Whenever people talk about the impact of television on society, the concerns are often framed with television as a toxin: Ingest just a little, and you'll survive, but too much is simply poison. Many experts on media would prefer, however, to talk about a "TV diet" that takes into account the different types of content that one might see on TV. Watch PBS, and you're eating your vegetables. Watch the Home Shopping Channel, and you've just consumed a Pop-Tart. Taking a page from the "consumption" playbook, what if we think about children's screentime as yogurt? It's not a must-have food, but it sure can taste good. Some brands come with too much sugar, too much food-dye, too much corn syrup, too much obnoxious packaging. Sometimes yogurt simply masquerades as good for you, but it isn't. (Frozen yogurt comes to mind.) But, for many children, some yogurts are just plain wholesome and well-worth eating, and they come in a bunch of different flavors.  What's more, we all know that if we ate nothing but yogurt -- if we didn't make room for other foods (or, to carry the analogy, if we didn't make room for other activities like playing, coloring, exploring) -- we wouldn't look so good.  In our house right now, the yogurt of choice is Stonyfield's peach.  And the new PBS show Super Why is a favorite too. 4:58:37 PM    comment []

	Thursday, September 20, 2007

Want to study a baby's brain? Try it while he's sleeping Parents are not the only ones wondering what new connections are being made inside their babies' brains. Scientists want to know too. And given the heightened excitement about new technologies like brain scanners, you might think that new information would come pouring forth about how a young brain develops, what stimulates it and how neurons make connections. But it's not so easy. Most scanning technology is built for adults, who can be told to sit still. Babies wiggle and squirm. The unpredictable little buggers are impossible to order around. What if, however, the babies were sleeping? They squirm a bit, yes, but try positioning them in a little cradle that restricts their movements and gently glide them into a fMRI scanner. That is just what a group of scientists in Sweden have done. Their paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, shows some of the first evidence of five resting-state networks in infants. I have a long way to go before in my neuroscience education before I can decipher the significance of what they found, but it was fascinating to see the picture that accompanied the article. Go to this post by the Neurophilosophy blogger on ScienceBlogs to see a photo of a bundled newborn, eyes shut and sleeping, with a pacifier at the ready, preparing to be scanned. 1:14:40 PM    comment []

	Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Turning the pages on visual literacy Illustrated books. Picture books. You might think they are one and the same. But a wonderful explanatory essay published by Parents' Choice sheds some golden light on how they are different -- and why picture books can be so magical, for children and adults. The article is by Jerry Griswold, Director of San Diego State University's National Center for the Study of Children's Literature. Griswold talks about the interplay between text and picture -- and how the illustrations in a picture book provide a story unto themselves that interweaves with the text, instead of simply rehashing it. Here's an excerpt. Take the moment in Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit when Peter has lost his shoes and jacket while escaping from Mr. McGregor. The text reads: "Mr. McGregor hung up the little jacket and the shoes for a scarecrow to frighten the blackbirds." But Potter's picture shows something else: the blackbirds aren't frightened at all; indeed, they are lollygagging around the base of the scarecrow. Neither the words alone, nor the picture alone, is sufficient. Separately, each tells a different story. Together, they mean something more. Lately I've been thinking about visual literacy, about how our children are growing up surrounded by screens that tells stories in color and sound, not just text. I want to learn more about how children learn to read these screens, how and if they discern some of the visual clues they offer. Griswold's article provides an opening for some fascinating questions about what literacy means and how rich a story can be when it mixes text and picture with mastery. P.S. Disclaimer: Be warned that I've got a undeniable bias for Parents' Choice; I am now under contract to do some writing and reviewing for the Web site, which in my opinion, is pretty darn sharp. More about that in an upcoming blog post. 12:30:19 PM    comment []

	Monday, September 17, 2007

13 minutes of video, measured and coded with ultimate precision Rachel Barr of Georgetown is one of the leading researchers on how video affects babies, and I interviewed her over lunch the other day. At one point, our talk turned to coding in psychology experiments -- that painstaking, second-by-second, task of recording even the slightest turn of a baby's head. In Barr's experiments, she and her research team are coding two things at once: They record every movement that babies make, while also measuring and taking note of every feature that appears on the TV screen the babies are watching. In an article Barr wrote for the peer-reviewed journal Infancy, you can get a sense of how intense and methodical these procedures can be. Using a formula like that used in studies of book reading, Barr and her co-authors measured how video -- and particular features of video -- affected the way parents and babies (12, 15 and 18 month old) responded to the content. Their work focused on 13 minutes from two videos -- Baby Mozart and the Sesame Street video Kids' Favorite Songs 2. They noted every question uttered, every movement made. What they found was that many parents do, indeed, interact with video as they do with books. They point and label. ("Do you see the ball? Where's the ball?" "There's a caterpillar!") And when they do, babies pay attention. Not every parent in their study was a pointer and labeler, however. Some parents rarely or never talked to their babies about the video. Those cases were associated with lower levels of attention from babies. They looked at the content less. Now, does the act of paying attention mean that babies are showing comprehension? Not necessarily. The Infancy study makes clear that we still have a ways to go before we can say exactly what and how much babies are understanding of these videos. But the same might be said about sessions of book reading. What we do know is that parental pointing and labeling is commonly associated with learning. As child development experts will tell you, it's that moment of joint attention that matters.  Note: The article is from a forthcoming issue of Infancy, not yet available online.   10:24:33 AM    comment []

	Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Learning literacy from TV This week's newsletter from PBS caught my eye with its "Quick Literacy Tips."  Deciding to click further, I noticed this heading: In front of the T.V. (or computer) Now, most parents know that learning literacy doesn't have to be limited to book time. But rarely do you see suggestions about how to use multimedia -- i.e., TV time -- to introduce children to new ideas, new words, new stretches of narrative. The PBS site goes that extra step. This isn't about simply finding a good show for preschoolers. This is about using the TV and its role in daily life: For example, here's one suggestion: What Happens Next?  Make a plan with your child for T.V. watching. Connect this plan to other events in his day and introduce words that describe time. For example tell him “First, we are going to the grocery store. Next we are going to eat lunch. Then you can watch your favorite T.V. show. After that, we are going to turn off the television and go to the park.” Other options include adopting the remote control as a device for recognizing numbers, using computer keyboards to talk about letters, using digital photographs of family to talk about the people and events in a toddler's life. Of course, the Literacy Tips go far beyond TV time as well -- including some ideas for rhyming games to play at the mall or prediction games prompted by a walk around the neighborhood. 10:31:30 AM    comment []

	Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Kids say 'yum' to Mickey D's If you don't believe that brands can influence children, just try driving by a McDonald's with an 2-year-old in the car. Even if children don't have the words to verbalize their adoration, I'm willing to bet that they will point and wave in excitement. So it isn't a big surprise to hear that when 63 preschoolers were asked to take a taste test, they showed a significant preference for the taste of the food from McDonald's -- even when given exactly the same food in unbranded packaging. These are the results from a study led by Thomas N. Robinson, a pediatrician at Stanford, that were released last week in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine.   What I found interesting was how TV played into the results. The more television sets in a child's house, the more the children pointed to McDonald's food when asked what tasted "best."  [Please note: These blog entries will soon be integrated into my new Web site -- www.lisaguernsey.com -- where you can subscribe to my newsletter. Take a look!] 5:18:04 PM    comment []

Disney versus U-W Disney isn't happy about the latest research out of the University of Washington. Here's a blog post from DaddyTypes and a quick link on Working Dad about the Walt Disney Company asking the University of Washington to retract its news release about the study. At issue is whether the new release was fair in describing the U-W study. They don't like Baby Einstein videos being singled out in a catch-all category of "baby videos." And they stress that the research was based on a one-time survey, not a controlled trial that can get at questions of cause-and-effect. Fair points. But it's also worth noting that there isn't solid research out there to show any benefit from Baby Einstein videos either. On the other hand, there is some preliminary research showing positve effects of a baby video of an entirely different design: Sesame Beginnings. Yet-to-be-published research from the University of Massachusetts showed that Sesame Beginnings -- with its emphasis on singing and talking to babies -- caused an uptick in parent-child interaction when the video was off. For more, see my blog post from the Society for Research in Child Development meeting in March. 4:23:44 PM    comment []

	Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Babies, DVDs, and language development Babies who watch an hour of baby videos each day learn fewer words than their peers, according to a study that will appear later today in The Journal of Pediatrics. The news has already been reported in a story by HealthDay (on the RevolutionHealth web site) and in a report from The Los Angeles Times, among other places. The study, based on a telephone survey with about 1,000 parents in Washington and Minnesota, showed that there was a significant link between scores on language tests and the amount of baby-video viewing by babies 8 to 16 months old. With one hour of viewing videos like Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby, children's scores slipped by about 17 percentile points, or the equivalent of 6 to 8 words. One theory for the slippage, the authors write, is that the DVDs are replacing time in which parents could be talking to their babies, reading to them and telling them stories. In fact, by contrast, scores were significantly higher among parents who read to their babies or told them stories at least once a day. "What did show up," said Dimitri Christakis, one of the study authors, in a brief telephone interview, "was that reading and telling stories were all positively associated with language development." The lead author is Frederick Zimmerman and the other name on the report is Andrew Meltzoff. All three authors are oft-cited researchers at the University of Washington. Three points that intrigued me and call out for more discussion: A negative association with baby videos did not show up for an older group of children -- those aged 17 to 24 months. Why not? Children's educational shows were seen to have no correlation with language development, either good or bad, in either age group It is a small proportion of parents who are putting their children in front of baby DVDs for that long. The study showed that, at the median, babies were watching about 9 minutes of baby videos a day. (Other media -- like children's shows and grownup TV -- took up other small chunks of the babies' video diet.) In my upcoming book on screen time among kids 0-5, I talk about the lack of research behind marketing claims for these videos. I also point to research that describes how important it is to put video time in the context of healthy daily routine. That means thinking about what screen time is replacing.   5:14:19 PM    comment []

	Monday, August 06, 2007

Technical note and reminder: After my switch to Windows Vista, I haven't been able to update the navigation bar on this blog, nor any of my non-blog pages. ($#*!@ Vista.) So here is the updated version of About Me, as well as my new Web site: www.lisaguernsey.com. Thanks for reading. 3:51:50 PM    comment []

Role Play = Teen Play = Educational Eye Opener I'm not a teacher, but every once in a while I like to browse through Innovate, a journal about online education. Sometimes the pieces are dry, dry, dry. But this month, several articles have juice. Most interesting to me, given my Barbie musings, is an article about an educational experiment that took place two summers ago in There and Second Life -- two virtual worlds that give people the chance to be whoever they want to be. As part of a summer camp, a few lucky (and computer savvy) high school students were asked to assume different online identities and interact in multiple online games. For example, in one game, boys became girls and girls became boys. Post-game discussions, the authors wrote, were rich with talk of diversity, stereotypes and cultural expectations. As one of the students put it: "These games provide a risk-free environment for exploration and discovery." The article, Leveraging Identity to Make Learning Fun, was written by Joey J. Lee, a PhD student at Penn State, and Christopher M. Hoadley, who runs Dolcelab, a learning/design/computer lab there. I want to visit. Lee and Hoadley point out that similar themes come up in a 2001 article by Marina Umaschi Bers in the Journal of the Learning Sciences. I am glad for the pointer to Bers. And it's not just because she has worked under some big names in education -- like Seymour Papert, Mitch Resnick and Sherry Turkle. She also hails from Argentina and has worked on education projects in Thailand and Costa Rica. She is now an assistant professor at Tufts University, working on some projects related to early child development. I want to visit her too.   3:34:43 PM    comment []

	Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Correction to my upcoming book It's never fun to discover a mistake after something has already gone to press, and when it happens in a book, it's worse yet.  In the preface and first chapter of my upcoming book, I describe data from a national survey used by Dimitri Christakis and Frederick Zimmerman in their 2004 Pediatrics article that showed an association between attention problems and the viewing of television in early childhood. I mistakenly said that the data came from the 1980s. It didn't. It was based on survey data from the 1990s.  We'll make the correction in second printings, but it's too late to make the change in the early versions of the book. I am kicking myself as I type. If you're curious about my description of their research, you can read some of it in a story I wrote for The Washington Post back in 2004. In my upcoming book, I go into more detail about the study, including more caveats and quotes from ADHD experts who have criticized it. The main point of dissecting the study is to quell some of the furor and misinformation generated by media reports of the results. (For example, the study did not include any survey data about diagnoses of ADHD; it relied on parents' reports of behavioral problems in their kids.)  It's also important to point out how little we know about cause-and-effect. To say that attention problems are linked to watching TV doesn't mean that attention problems are caused by watching TV, as the study authors readily acknowledge. In fact, some experts say there is reason to believe that the causal arrow could point the other direction. For example, maybe children who have attention problems at age 7 showed signs of problems at earlier ages, leading their parents to put them in front of the TV as a coping mechanism. Or perhaps, given that ADHD is thought to be hereditary, the parents of these children have attention problems themselves. Researchers have noted that people with ADHD may watch more TV, in part as a way to cope with the isolation that comes with the disorder. And if the parents are watching a lot of TV, it's likely that their very young children are too. In short, there's a lot more to learn before definitive statements can be made about TV's relationship to ADHD. 10:01:59 AM    comment []

	Monday, July 23, 2007

Skipping rope and stirring surprise Have you ever thought of using a jump rope to stimulate creativity? I hadn't. But some cognitive scientists in the United Kingdom have been testing an interactive exhibit for children that is supposed to do just that. What the children use, however, is no ordinary jump rope. It's called the EYE-JUMP, and it's embedded with tiny electronic devices and light emitting diodes. Once put into motion (in what I assume is a dimly lit space), the rope displays visual and audio information -- even enabling a smiley face to hang in the air.  I read about EYE-JUMP in the conference proceedings from Creativity and Cognition 2007, a conference hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery in Washington, DC last month. The paper, written by Su Zheng and colleagues at Coventry University in the U.K., describes how this "hybrid interactive exhibit" -- and its effect of delightful surprise -- got children to think outside the box and to "produce their own design for multiple uses of a common object." I haven't been able to find any video or web site about this exhibit, but I'll keep hunting. I know my kids and I would jump for a jump rope like this one. 10:31:54 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2007 Lisa Guernsey. Last update: 10/26/2007; 11:31:58 AM.