About this session

Friday, 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM

Designing and researching educational multimedia programs for family co-engagement

On average, young children spend about two and a half hours a day on screens (Rideout & Robb, 2020). Research emphasizes media and technology's impact on children's development and families' vital role in enhancing children's media comprehension (Barr, 2019; Griffith & Arnold, 2018; Takeuchi & Stevens, 2011). When designing children’s media, it is essential to prioritize active engagement by both caregivers and children (Digital Promise, 2021). This concept, known as co-engagement, is especially important when developing media for historically marginalized communities, where collaborative design efforts such as co-engagement are under-explored (Levinson & Barron, 2018).

In this roundtable, panelists share tips for developing interactive children’s media content that supports families’ co-engagement and effective research strategies for gathering findings to iteratively improve family programs. Topics we address include:
• What design elements encourage co-engagement?
• What are tools and techniques that you have used to foster co-engagement during family programming, and what are the affordances and challenges of each?
• What are the major challenges in implementing and researching interactive educational media content with families?
• What is an example of how flexibility in your approach has led to actionable research findings that support co-engagement?

Momo Hayakawa, PhD, is an executive producer of a children’s television show and director of child development and research at Twin Cities PBS. In addition to producing children’s media, she studies the impact of transmedia content on early elementary children and the role of family engagement in media-based learning. She will address how children’s interactive media content for family programming is developed to be versatile and flexible for implementation across a variety of out-of-school-time settings. She will discuss specific programmatic considerations that ensure that caregivers with multiple children of varying ages are able to participate in a family program. She will share concrete examples of co-engagement techniques that are used and facilitate conversation around the affordances of each. Examples include conversation cards to prompt content-rich discussions within and between families, to-go activities that provide additional opportunities for families to practice and apply their learnings, and co-viewing guides with questions that caregivers can ask their children while watching television episodes, playing digital games, or engaging with eBooks together.

Camellia Sanford-Dolly, PhD, is a research director at Rockman et al Cooperative, an educational research and evaluation group. Her work explores how family engagement and learning conversations occur over time and across different shared spaces. She will highlight findings from early studies of a multimedia family program, sharing what caregivers thought about and how they used conversational supports and activities provided both during and after the program with their children. Quotes from family interviews and program observations will be provided via a handout to address areas where co-engagement was occurring or being encouraged. Examples include the use of headphone splitters to co-view videos, and educators modeling questions for families to ask one another. Dr. Sanford-Dolly will also unpack challenges program educators and caregivers faced while engaging with media together with children, including slow internet connectivity and underutilized resources that required more scaffolding. Ways to mitigate these challenges, such as expectation-setting with caregivers and educators and framing media as a space where co-learning can occur, will also be discussed. Finally, Dr. Sanford-Dolly will describe ways that the research team pivoted its methodologies to respond to study participants’ needs, engage them in shared meaning-making, and communicate programmatic changes that the project team made based on their feedback.

Susie Beltrán-Grimm, PhD, is an assistant professor of applied developmental psychology and education at Portland State University and previous early learning director for PBS SoCal. Her research is dedicated to leveraging asset-based frameworks to explore the cultural and contextual factors of Latine families to maximize math learning, media, and technology usage through opportunities in home, school, and community spaces. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, she seeks to extend knowledge of diverse family values and practices and build from children's and families' lived experiences and cultural funds of knowledge to bolster children's early childhood experiences. She is interested in families as co-designers and the profound impact of collaborative, participatory action research methodologies in promoting equity within communities. Dr. Beltrán-Grimm will describe how public media developers can collaborate with Latine families to create culturally relevant, Spanish-language digital media that promotes co-engagement in early math learning. The Family Math program at PBS SoCal was designed to facilitate interaction between children and their caregivers, creating a shared learning experience where both parties are actively involved in mathematical exploration and understanding. She will share co-design methodologies that foster co-engagement practices for parents and children to engage together in learning. Dr. Beltrán-Grimm will also address the challenges and successes encountered in the program’s evaluation, highlighting how family involvement in both design and engagement led to a product that effectively promoted math learning for young children in Latine communities.

Naomi Hupert is a senior research scientist at the Education Development Center. She will share findings from the Intergenerational Learning Study conducted as part of the US Department of Education’s Ready To Learn initiative. The study included a diverse group of 105 parents and caregivers of 4–7-year-old children living in low-income households and collected data about use of media and intergenerational learning opportunities and activities through interviews, surveys, and media use reports. Researchers identified three key elements of children’s media content and design that can encourage intergenerational engagement and co-learning: content and format that 1) sparks conversation, 2) centers topics of common interest and skill, and 3) encourages co-play and reciprocal interaction. Descriptions of how these elements can be prompted by intentional media design will be shared. Information about the challenges that may interrupt co-engagement with media, as described by caregivers, can also provide guidance regarding how and when co-engagement with media is most likely to fit into home activities. Findings from a series of randomized controlled trial studies examining early learning outcomes will also be shared, which contain takeaways drawn from caregiver reports about how they observe media supporting learning and the ways in which they co-engage with their young children around media.

Children and caregivers are inundated with messages about limiting screen time, but screens have been integrated into our lives. How can we reframe interactions around media as opportunities for co-engaged learning? How can we develop supports and strategies to encourage caregivers to interact and learn with their children around media? Designing for co-engagement takes many forms––from co-viewing guides with discussion questions and suggested activities to in-game prompts to skilled facilitators modeling ways of talking about and applying learnings from media. Some developers and researchers even take it a step further to include families in program design from the outset to ensure that the experience authentically encourages co-engagement. In this roundtable, panelists will draw on their expertise as content developers and educational researchers to offer various techniques for supporting co-engagement between caregivers and young children in media-based family programs. Panelists will weigh in on the challenges and solutions they recommend when developing and implementing children’s media activities intended for family engagement. They offer examples from their current and previous projects and insights from project evaluation and research to consider what approaches to co-engagement have been most successful in supporting young children’s development through multimedia programming. Jennifer Borland, an evaluator with over 25 years of experience studying children’s media, will moderate the discussion. Children and caregivers are inundated with messages about limiting screen time, but screens have been integrated into our lives. How can we reframe interactions around media as opportunities for co-engaged learning? How can we develop supports and strategies to encourage caregivers to interact and learn with their children around media? Designing for co-engagement takes many forms––from co-viewing guides with discussion questions and suggested activities to in-game prompts to skilled facilitators modeling ways of talking about and applying learnings from media. Some developers and researchers even take it a step further to include families in program design from the outset to ensure that the experience authentically encourages co-engagement. In this roundtable, panelists will draw on their expertise as content developers and educational researchers to offer various techniques for supporting co-engagement between caregivers and young children in media-based family programs. Panelists will weigh in on the challenges and solutions they recommend when developing and implementing children’s media activities intended for family engagement. They offer examples from their current and previous projects and insights from project evaluation and research to consider what approaches to co-engagement have been most successful in supporting young children’s development through multimedia programming. Jennifer Borland, an evaluator with over 25 years of experience studying children’s media, will moderate the discussion.

Session moderator
Ms. Jennifer Borland, Rockman et al Cooperative, United States

Panelists
Momo Hayakawa, Ph.D., Twin Cities PBS , United States
Camellia Sanford-Dolly, Rockman et al , United States
Susana Beltran-Grimm, Ed.D., Purdue University, West Lafayette , United States
Naomi Hupert, M.Ed., Education Development Center , United States

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