Games and Learning

Television continues to dominate the way kids receive educational media, according to the survey. Photo by Moritz Petersen.

A recent survey of some 1,500 parents found that mobile and gaming platforms continue to underperform when it comes to education, trailing behind television in effectiveness.

The survey, “Learning at Home: Families’ Educational Media Use in America,” found that not only does educational media use continue to skew towards TV, its use also plummets as children enter school.

“While young children are spending much of their media time with educational content during their preschool years, their learning opportunities drop significantly as they get older and spend more time on mobile platforms,” said Dr. Michael H. Levine, director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, the organization that released the report.

Even those behind the report were surprised by how little impact mobile had in the overall educational media consumption of most young people.

“Right now, mobile media are not living up to their potential as a source of learning for kids, at least according to parents’ reports,” Vicky Rideout, a national expert in children’s media use and president of VJR Consulting, said.

And game developers also have work to do, if the report is correct.

Writing about the survey on Slate, Director of the Early Education Initiative at the New America Foundation Lisa Guernsey found, “On digital games, parents’ perspectives were less cut-and-dried. The survey asked about Angry Birds and Minecraft, digital games that emerged on the scene only a few years ago. Among parents who said they were familiar with the games—and for Minecraft, that wasn’t many—the majority rated them fairly low on the educational scale.”

In fact, Minecraft, which is used to teach everything from history to quantum physics, fared poorly in the survey with only 4 percent of parents calling it “very educational.”

The report was presented at a day-long symposium and many of the slides used to outline the findings are available here.

The study concludes that more needs to be done especially for children in school and around the use of new technology.

The authors end their report with a call for “more compelling content for older children, the development of popular and effective educational apps… expanded efforts to reach parents with objective and reliable assessments of eth educational value of media, and continued production of high-quality educational television.”

Editor’s Note: gamesandlearning.org is a project of the Games and Learning Publishing Council and is run by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center.