Enhancing children's educational television with design rationales and justifications

Abstract

This research involves creating a system that provides parents with tools and information to help children learn from television. Children who converse with their parents during television viewing are better able to evaluate and make sense of content. However, children might learn more if they are encouraged to go from simply understanding content to generating questions and problem solving strategies. To do this, we need to deliver teaching and learning strategies to parents so they can initiate dialogues with their children around television. This research describes a system, called the Parent Trap, which sends messages to parents about the television shows that their children watch. The information in the messages tries to model dialogues that promote more frequent and longer conversations, which include inquiry and explanation. These conversations might facilitate additional learning from television and encourage further discourse between parents and children around other programs and activities. In the thesis, I suggest ways that television shows can be augmented with additional, digital information to help parents learn strategies for conversing with their children. I also present preliminary evaluations to show that developing these strategies may help television producers change the ways that they think about the educational value of their content.