When word problems are a problem

Kenneth Chang had a fascinating story in the New York Times last week: Study Suggests Math Teachers Scrap Balls and Slices. The story describes a new study showing how children might learn mathematics best if they are taught in the abstract ((t + 1) = 400 - 50t) versus the concrete (One train leaves Station A at 6 p.m. traveling at 40 miles per hour toward Station B. A second train ...etc, etc.).

As Chang wrote:

Dr. Kaminski and her colleagues Vladimir M. Sloutsky and Andrew F. Heckler
did something relatively rare in education research: they performed a
randomized, controlled experiment. Their results appear in [the April 25] issue of
the journal Science.

The study reminded me of a story I wrote for the Times several years ago ("Testing: None of the Above") about how science and math questions on standardized tests can trip up students -- especially the brightest ones.

And how does this relate to technology? Good question, though I suspect that a lot of animations, games and educational videos directed at children today are rooted in "real world" problems, not abstractions. A worthwhile research question might be: Are these approaches the best way to prime kids for math, even if they seem more engaging than old-fashioned equations?

new-fangled writing, old-fashioned reading,

Two new reports came out last week:

• "Writing, Technology and Teens," from the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the College Board's National Commission on Writing.
• "What Kids Are Reading: The Book-Reading Habits of Students in American Schools," by Renaissance Learning.

The writing study was based on a national telephone survey of teens and parents. To hear a great discussion of its findings, go to Kojo Nnamdi's April 29th radio show.

The reading study is, according to Renaissance, the first report to get at what kids are actually reading rather than which books are purchased or assigned in class. The company's software captures data on what children read by quizzing them about details in the stories they have read. More than 63,000 schools use the software. "We are in the unique position of having arguably the world’s largest single database of student book-reading behavior," wrote Roy Truby, a senior VP for Renaissance and co-author of the report.

Quick take-aways from both: Teenagers are, in fact, writing a lot these days -- but it's texting and IMing, not the formal writing that educators say they need. In fact, the teenagers themselves say that they don't consider their informal writing to be real writing.

And the books that schoolchildren read? It depends, of course, on what grade you're talking about. In first grade, Dr. Seuss books are at the top. In 9th-12th grade, it's To Kill a Mockingbird. Interestingly, in high school, Night by Elie Wiesel is the 2nd most-often read book among top achievers.

"Let's fight fire with fire"

Analyzing the effect of new media on children is like trying to get your arms around a school of fish. The little buggers just slide on past, and you swallow a lot of water in the process. But here's another institution that has decided to give it a try: The Future of Children, a joint initiative of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School and the Brookings Institution.

Yesterday, the group held a forum to promote the release of a policy brief and new volume of its journal dedicated to electronic media and children. "What we learned," says Elisabeth Hirschhorn Donahue of Princeton University, "is that content matters." The second half of the forum focused on how media -- big and small, old-fashioned TV and social networking sites -- can be used to get positive social messages to children and adolescents. "Let's fight fire with fire," said Isabel Sawhill, a senior editor for The Future of Children.

During the forum, a smattering of policy wonks, communications scholars and health experts were treated to new forms of public service announcements that included the use of text-messaging, user-generated content, viral video and Web sites. Examples came from the 4parents.gov (a campaign to get parents talking to kids about sex), an HIV-awareness campaign on Think MTV , Stay Teen (to reduce teenage prenancy), and That Guy (to halt binge drinking).

Some other tidbits:

• Television use isn't going down with the rise in other electronic media, Hirshhorn says. Instead, "all these other things have added on top of it" and "multi-tasking is on the rise."
• This summer, futureofchildren.org will feature a database that allows researchers to examine media consumption by state.
• Three concerns were voiced by members of the audience yesterday: Where do we get the funding for positive social marketing? How do we get these messages into schools? And how do we measure whether any of it works?

Picking programming: My piece in today's Washington Post

I'm excited to report that I've got an article in the Outlook section of The Washington Post today. It's about how parents -- myself included -- need to select videos and TV programs for their children that take into account what their children can actually comprehend and make the most of.

In the final copy edit, however, a couple of sentences were cut. One noted that, according to well-designed studies, the social and academic gains that preschool-age children receive from Sesame Street may last through high school. The other sentence described the ills of background TV.

Here they are, for the sake of posterity:

It’s the same with Sesame Street. Many parents of infants figure that if
the show’s good for preschoolers, it’s probably good for a 10-month-old, too.
But that’s just not true, says Rosemarie Truglio, vice president for education
and research for Sesame Street. Yes, well-designed studies have shown that the
program’s academic and social benefits last into the high school years,
regardless of family income or education. But the show isn’t designed to be
comprehensible to children younger than 2.

Finding good programming for young children isn’t just about public television. And it’s certainly not about leaving PBS on regardless of whether the kids are watching (a strategy I've heard from few parents). Studies show that background TV can lead children to bop distractedly from one toy to another, and it could interfere with speech and language development.

Thinking differently about reading, gaming, and cheating

"The problem is that educational game designers have approached the problem backward: Rather than striving to get games into education, educators should be investigating ways to get education into games." -- Karl Royle, University of Wolverhampton School of Education

I pulled this quote from the most recent issue of Innovate, in which Royle writes about how to improve upon popular videogames (including first-person shooters for, presumably, adolescents) to slip in more opportunities for learning, whether introducing scientific concepts or higher-level reading skills.

His article reminds me of recent findings from the Cooney Center, which issued a call to fill the edu-game gap. And it also ties into the work of James Paul Gee, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Royle dives into a discussion of "cheats" that reminds me of Gee's proposal that children gain skills in reading when they pore over the extra textual stuff that come with games, like "cheats" (hints for moving forward in a game) and web sites that help them to master the videogame's world.

Royle continues the theme: "External cheats require users to read complex instructional text in order to solve a problem, promoting literacy. The search for cheats is itself pedagogically important; the moment a player searches for extra knowledge, an independent learning strategy is invoked."

It would be fascinating to see some research on this, comparing children with and without access to (or with and without the desire or encouragement to use) those texts and documents that might push the envelope of their literacy learning. Perhaps studies like that are out there and I haven't yet come across them?

Parents sound off on whether TV belongs in a child's bedroom

According to 2005 data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 43 percent of children ages 4 to 6 have a television in their bedroom. The numbers are lower for younger children, but still suprisingly high and disturbing to many experts in child development, who note that several studies show correlations between bedroom TVs and lower achievement at school. (I don't have easy access to data for bedroom TVs with older children but will look it up. Stay tuned.)

Last week, BabyCenter.com opened an unscientific poll asking, "Does your child have a TV in his or her room?" When I checked the results this morning, about one-quarter of parents had responded that, yes, there is a TV in their child's bedroom. Does it belong there? That question has prompted hundreds of parents to chime in on the BabyCenter.com bulletin boards. Opinions run strong against the idea and many parents say that "no TV in the bedroom" is one rule they will stick by even as their children get older. But some parents say the context of their household (not to mention the layout of the house itself) plays a role. One mother wrote that her daughter has a TV with a DVD player in her room, but that the TV isn't hooked up for service. "She can only watch DVDs on it," she wrote. "On Sunday, she has movie time while I get the house cleaned."

See the Kaiser Family Foundation's 2006 report, "The Media Family," for several tidbits of interesting data and in-depth discussion of the topic. One surprise from their research, which I wrote about in my book, is that parents were putting the TVs in the bedrooms not because they didn't know what to do with extra TVs (which was expected to be the answer) but because they wanted to be able to use the TV in the family room for their own shows.

What are they listening to?

Disney has hired Arbitron to help it track the listening behavior of children and adolescents, according to Radio Ink and Cynopsis: Kids. As Cynopsis wrote, "This marks the first time that Arbitron will measure the radio listening behavior of kids and tweens."

So how much do teens listen to the radio in the first place? Here's some new data about online listening that provides some answers. Arbitron released some early results yesterday from its study, with Edison Media Research, about online listening habits. The company says that 33 million Americans age 12 or older listen to a radio station over the Internet during an average week (an increase from 29 million one year ago) and that there is also a strong connection between online radio listening and social networking sites.