I've been impressed with The Washington Post's weeklong series on childhood obesity, which has covered multiple different angles on this topic with great graphics and video too. A story titled "Two Worlds, One problem" by Annie Gowen explored how obesity is an epidemic in both the suburban environment (where kids seem to have so many options for activity and still grow fatter) and the inner cities (where safety is a concern for outdoor play.) Gowen told the story of parents in Centrevile, Va., who were trying to tackle their son's growing waistline using different tactics. Some of them involved media: "Now McDonnell also locks up the Nintendo video game system," she wrote, "and has parental controls on the television.
Exploring another element of media's impact was Vicky Rideout, a vice president for the Kaiser Family Foundation, who answered questions for the Post's online chat today. The foundation has published several studies on the influence of media and marketing on child health using well-designed surveys and focus groups. Rideout's talk today focused on how and if the marketing of high-fat, high-sugar foods may be implicated in children's unhealthy habits. This is a topic to which I devoted a chapter in my book as well. (I devoted several pages, for example, to the saga of the Disney Princess "Fruit Snacks" and my girls' unshakable desire for them.) During my work on the book, I was surprised to discover that current science points to junk-food advertising, instead of sedentary lifestyle, as the most plausible reason for the link between childhood obesity and TV watching.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Monday, May 19, 2008
Madden Football and learning math
More than a week ago I moderated a panel for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center's inaugural symposium. About 200 folks with money, power, influence and interesting ideas about technology and learning crammed into a room on the top floor of the McGraw-Hill building on 6th Avenue in NYC and exchanged promos for their products, programs, agendas and aggravations.
Scott Traylor of 360Kids has ably blogged about the event and highlighted the comments of Connie Yowell, director of education at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. At one point, Yowell asked the audience if they could see the learning that took place when children played Madden Football, a popular and long-running videogame produced by Electronic Arts. A sprinkling of attendees raised their hands for "yes." As Yowell said, "If you can’t understand where learning is happening through the Madden game, then we’re in the wrong paradigm. If you’re stuck in conversations about whether or not the Encyclopedia Britannica is better than Wikipedia, then we’re in the old paradigm."
I too was fascinated by her remarks. But I've got questions about Madden Football and whether the learning moments of the game are explicit enough to really help the kids of today become the math whizzes we'll need tomorrow. Seems to me a great topic for some real research, honestly. Is anyone out there following 10-year-olds who are growing up on videogame football to see where they end up? And do children learn more being in the game (via video simulation) than watching the game on TV and doing the mental calculations in their heads of plays tried and yards run? Anyone know teachers who are riffing off of these games in their classes? Email me if you've got some good leads. Thanks.
Scott Traylor of 360Kids has ably blogged about the event and highlighted the comments of Connie Yowell, director of education at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. At one point, Yowell asked the audience if they could see the learning that took place when children played Madden Football, a popular and long-running videogame produced by Electronic Arts. A sprinkling of attendees raised their hands for "yes." As Yowell said, "If you can’t understand where learning is happening through the Madden game, then we’re in the wrong paradigm. If you’re stuck in conversations about whether or not the Encyclopedia Britannica is better than Wikipedia, then we’re in the old paradigm."
I too was fascinated by her remarks. But I've got questions about Madden Football and whether the learning moments of the game are explicit enough to really help the kids of today become the math whizzes we'll need tomorrow. Seems to me a great topic for some real research, honestly. Is anyone out there following 10-year-olds who are growing up on videogame football to see where they end up? And do children learn more being in the game (via video simulation) than watching the game on TV and doing the mental calculations in their heads of plays tried and yards run? Anyone know teachers who are riffing off of these games in their classes? Email me if you've got some good leads. Thanks.
The next Sandbox Summit: NYC in September
The Sandbox Summit started as just an event, a few days of forums and exhibits at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this past January. A couple hundred people turned out to listen to industry experts talk about how technology is changing the way children play. (I made remarks introducing one of the panels and blogged a little here.)
Now the Sandbox Summit is becoming something more -- a continuing forum, both on and offline, designed to look more deeply at the question from all sides, including educators, company leaders, health experts, child advocates and parents. The advisory board was announced last week and I'm excited to be a part of it. Journalists are supposed to avoid joining boards, and I thought hard about this one. But since I'm already a regular writer for Parents' Choice, the foundation that started the Sandbox Summit, I recognize that I'm already in the mix and invested in helping to further the conversation. As with this blog, my goal is to continue investigating what we know -- based on scientific research wherever possible -- about how electronic media is affecting the way we, as human beings, learn and think.
The next Sandbox Summit, titled The New Playing Fields, is scheduled for September 24 in New York City.
Now the Sandbox Summit is becoming something more -- a continuing forum, both on and offline, designed to look more deeply at the question from all sides, including educators, company leaders, health experts, child advocates and parents. The advisory board was announced last week and I'm excited to be a part of it. Journalists are supposed to avoid joining boards, and I thought hard about this one. But since I'm already a regular writer for Parents' Choice, the foundation that started the Sandbox Summit, I recognize that I'm already in the mix and invested in helping to further the conversation. As with this blog, my goal is to continue investigating what we know -- based on scientific research wherever possible -- about how electronic media is affecting the way we, as human beings, learn and think.
The next Sandbox Summit, titled The New Playing Fields, is scheduled for September 24 in New York City.
Paneling a la Virginia Heffernan
I always enjoy Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times Magazine. (If you're a wordie, check out her piece on OED.com, the Internet-based, subscription-based Oxford English Dictionary.) But it was her blog post about the tribulations of moderating a recent panel about women in film that made me smile this weekend. "It was fun, but I don’t really understand panels," she wrote, "and I really shouldn’t do them because I’m a loser moderator." Here, here, sister. I moderated a panel about literacy and technology earlier this month at The Joan Ganz Cooney Center and although my charge was to "start a conversation," I was a little preoccupied with just trying to make sure that the speakers stuck to their allotted five minutes. To get a real conversation going, you need to ban Powerpoint. But in today's visual culture, that ain't so easy.
Still, there were certainly some provocative ideas to tease out -- so I'll be writing more about the Cooney panel soon.
Still, there were certainly some provocative ideas to tease out -- so I'll be writing more about the Cooney panel soon.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
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:
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:
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.
- "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 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.
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