Media Exposure During Infancy and Early Childhood ― The Effects of Content and Context on Learning and Development

This book discusses the burgeoning world of young children’s exposure to educational media and its myriad implications for research, theory, practice, and policy. Experts across academic disciplines and the media fill knowledge gaps and address concerns regarding apps, eBooks, and other screen-based technologies—which are being used by younger and younger children—and content delivery and design. Current research shows the developmental nuances of the child as learner in home, school, and mobile contexts, and the changes as parenting and pedagogy accommodate the complexities of the new interactive world. The book also covers methods for evaluating the quality of new media and prosocial digital innovations such as video support for separated families and specialized apps for at-risk toddlers.

Highlights of the coverage:

Media Exposure During Infancy and Early Childhood is an essential resource for researchers, clinicians and related professionals, and graduate students in diverse fields including infancy and early childhood development, child and school psychology, social work, pediatrics, and educational psychology.

Rachel Barr, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University and Director of the Georgetown Early Learning Project. Dr. Barr received her Ph.D. from the University of Otago, New Zealand. She is primarily interested in how children bridge the gap between what they learn from media and how they apply that information in the real world. ?She has written frequently about the Transfer deficit which is the consistent finding that infants and toddlers learn less from television and touchscreens than from face-to-face interactions due to memory constraints and also how the transfer deficit can be ameliorated by including repetition, additional language cues and appropriate use of television features to enhance learning. She has also examined how parents can facilitate learning from both touchscreens and television. Finally, she has provided developmental expertise while working with media developers and she has collaborated on a project that has used media content as part of an early intervention parenting program for incarcerated teen fathers.?

Deborah Nichols Linebarger, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Human Development and Director of the Children’s Media Lab at Purdue University. Dr. Linebarger received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin. She is primarily interested in the interface between children’s cognitive development (i.e., learning, language and early literacy skills, executive function) and educational media and how and whether these relations vary by important demographic and social indicators including poverty status, culturally- and linguistically-diverse populations, age, and location of residence (e.g., rural or urban). To examine this interface, she conducts descriptive work to detail media access and use patterns and relations among these patterns and child development; micro-level experimental work to detect the features used in media that direct attention and contribute to content comprehension; and macro-level intervention work that combines the knowledge gained through both descriptive and basic research and applies it in various real-world contexts. In the latter capacity, she has extensive experience evaluating the efficacy of various media products and media interventions (i.e., 22 different products and interventions evaluated across 52 different studies) using theoretically- and empirically-rigorous research methods and evaluation techniques. Recent projects and consultancies include Sesame Workshop, PBS Kids/CPB, Between the Lions, WGBH public TV, Sprout, LeapFrog, Disney, Nickleodeon, the World Bank, and members of Congress.