Friday, March 30, 2007

Sesame Beginnings gets a preliminary reprieve When Sesame Workshop came out with its Sesame Beginnings baby videos last spring, the complaints rolled in immediately. Critics said it was wrong for the non-profit company to be making videos that would give parents reason to put babies in front of the TV screen. But today at the SRCD meeting, researchers from the University of Massachusetts gave Sesame Workshop a glimpse of good news: Data from a two-week viewing experiment showed that the videos may be effective at getting parents to interact with their children. The results did not include a control group of non-video-viewing families -- a point that was raised immediately by critics in the audience. (Tiffany Pempek, who presented the research, said that data from the control group was in the process of being collected.) Nor were the researchers able to compare their results with way parents interacted with their children before participating in the study. But the findings, Pempek said, did show a positive effect of repeated co-viewing episodes, that is, moments in which parents and children were watching together. "The more they watched Sesame Beginnings," she said, "the more they were active with the child when the video was off." I don't expect for a minute that this will end the debate on the appropriateness of baby videos. Other presenters today were Deborah Linebarger of the University of Pennsylvania and Rachel Barr of Georgetown -- both of whom had research providing additional nuance and complexity to the issue of young children and TV. And if the sometimes agitated discussion that followed is any indication, the topic is at hot as ever.  10:13:10 PM    comment []

Lessons from early research on interactive media Imagine a preschooler sitting down in front of a new computer game but given no instruction on how to play it. Would the child be able to make sense of the interface on his own? That was one of the questions being probed by Shuli Gilutz, a doctoral student at Columbia Teachers College, at SRCD today. Her results showed that something significant seems to be happening for children once they hit 4.5 years old. Several children younger than that had trouble. But after age 4.5, almost all the children could figure out what to do. Other presenters on this SRCD panel offered insights like: "Children crave control." Those are the words of Warren Buckleitner, whose dissertation research at Michigan State led him to realize that preschool software with intense narration and exclamations of encouragement slow kids down. He found that quiet interfaces worked better, enabling children to work at their own, more rapid, pace. When it comes to using interactive TV, very young children have great difficulty using remote controls that require them to use arrows and "select" buttons. Sesame Workshop tested interfaces that didn't require as much dexterity and found that 3-year-olds had more success. Young children may be most effective -- and least frustrated -- when using something like the Nintendo Wii, which enables people to manipulate on-screen images by moving their bodies.   9:57:13 PM    comment []

Figuring out which teaching methods measure up -- including virtual ones At 8:30 this morning, in an oversized conference room at the farthest corner of the Hynes Convention Center here in Boston, I joined at least 100 other people in hearing about the interdisciplinary work of David Klahr, a cognitive scientist at Carnegie Mellon whose career has taken him through the fields of engineering, mathematics, science, psychology, information processing and education. Klahr and his colleagues have been conducting research on how to best teach children science. One question he has been pondering of late is how to get kids to design good scientific experiments, to see the variables that need to be manipulated, and to come to sound conclusions. In several studies, he has compared "exploratory" teaching methods, in which children are told to try to reach a goal and then mostly left to their own instincts, with "explicit" teaching methods, in which teachers stand alongside, guiding children to think about what they are working on and asking questions like "can you tell for sure?"  So far, with experiments on preschoolers and elementary-age children, the winner is "explicit" instruction. Kids, he says, need more guidance than we may think. Interestingly, Klahr has also compared hands-on science with the virtual kind -- experiments that are shown in computer graphics on screen. Conventional wisdom says that virtual science cannot possibly be as good for kids as enabling them to manipulate real objects. But in his studies, the difference was so minimal as to be virtually non-existent.  9:36:17 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2007 Lisa Guernsey. Last update: 4/5/2007; 10:11:40 PM.