Sandra L. Calvert - US grants

American children spend many hours with media each day. Although much of this time involves television viewing, an increasing amount involves participation with digital interactive entertainment technologies, including the Internet. Even television as we know it will soon change dramatically, with digital television adding improved clarity of images and the opportunity for interactivity. Knowing how to use these interactive technologies will be a necessary skill for an educated workforce in the 21st century and may be a gateway to studying science and technology. Therefore, knowing how children use and learn from these digital technologies is an important step in ensuring that children will develop these basic skills.

Although children invest their free time heavily in electronic entertainment media, relatively little is known about how new interactive media impact children's learning in informal learning contexts. One problem is that the field is interdisciplinary. Researchers examine diverse issues rather than examine specific areas of interactive digital media systematically and then consolidate that knowledge into a central information base. Another problem is the rapid change in digital technologies, making researchers one step behind the latest developments. One outcome of these problems is a poor knowledge base for understanding of how new digital entertainment technologies influence children's learning.

Over the next 5 years, this Center will advance theory and method in how children learn through digital interactive entertainment media. Using an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the fields of psychology, human development, communications, sociology, anthropology, and medicine, researchers will explore multiple levels of analysis in order to explicate the role that dialogue, in the form of interactivity and identity, play in children's learning from entertaining interactive digital technologies. At a macro level, two types of survey will be conducted to document patterns of change and similarity over time in children's access to, and use of, new and emerging digital platforms. These macro level studies will guide the direction of micro level experimental, observational, and ethnographic studies that will examine what interactivity is and how and what children learn from online digital experiences. Parallel research activities will examine children at different age groups, providing both cross-sectional and longitudinal findings on children's uses of media and the impact of media on their development.

Overall, these research activities will expand the knowledge base about: 1) the kinds of digital media that are emerging; 2) the kinds of interactive digital media experiences children choose to have; 3) the impact of these interactive experiences on children's long-term social adjustment and academic achievement; 4) how specific kinds of interactions with digital technologies impact children's learning; 5) how interacting with each other online influences children's learning and identity construction; and 6) how observational and interactive experiences are represented in the developing brain. This knowledge base will be disseminated in published form in professional journals, through presentations at national and international conferences, and via interconnected websites to create synergistic activities among the researchers, policy makers, child advocacy groups, and creators in the children and digital media field.

The Children's Digital Media Centers, based at Georgetown University, will also include the University of Texas at Austin, Northwestern University, and the University of California Los Angeles. Centers will include a Steering Committee and an Advisory Board of distinguished colleagues.

Children's television viewing often involves extended experiences with familiar characters. Unlike any previous technological age, these characters are now present in many different kinds of media, including television programs and advertisements, computer games, and mobile Apps. In addition to entertaining and teaching viewers, these characters also sell to children, including unhealthy foods that have been linked to the childhood obesity crisis that plagues our nation. While characters such as these have been used as marketing tools for many years, little is known about the extent to which this marketing is effective, or the specific conditions under which children are susceptible to its influence. The investigators will test their theory that the existence of one-sided, emotionally-tinged friendships that children form with media characters--known as parasocial relationships--are central to their influence. The researchers will develop and validate an assessment scale for measuring the strength of parasocial relationships and use it to determine what factors influence relationship magnitude and predict the likelihood of media character influences on children's preferences. The investigators will use an experimental method in which children interact with a novel media character to explore the dynamics of how parasocial relationships form and under what circumstances they lead to strong influence. They will characterize the extent to which this process varies between 3 and 8 years of age. Structural equation modeling will be used to calculate the effect magnitude of different factors on parasocial relationships and character motivation.

Without research about the underlying reasons for the obesity crisis, the future of our children is in peril. US children are now expected to have shorter life spans than their parents. Media characters may be playing an unhidden role in this epidemic. However, these same characters may also be able to change children's food choices and eating patterns by promoting healthier foods. The knowledge that will be gained from this project can help scientists understand the important role that media characters are playing in the childhood obesity crisis. This information can then be used to help parents make healthy decisions for their children in supermarkets and restaurants, to help businesses use their media characters more wisely, and to inform legislators about the kinds of policies that can improve the health and well being of future generations.

This 5-year research proposal lays out a set of studies that will be conducted across 3 sites (UC-Riverside, Northwestern University, and Georgetown University) with 18 month old to 6 year old children to explore how the relationships that children form with fictional characters (called parasocial) in DVDs and other digital media utilizing intelligent agents influence their learning of STEM concepts. The studies, though all focused on social attachment with media figures, use different measures and different stimuli: some assess children's perceptions of known media characters, while others introduce novel artifacts such as interactional toys. Little is known about how children's relationships with characters traverse different media platforms and whether similar learning principles apply in different media environments. In this research, the collaborative group of investigators brings the developmental and communication research areas into contact with the work in the learning sciences in a series of studies examining the formation and impact of parasocial relationships with characters in the toddler and preschool years.

This project addresses children's social experiences with characters on TV, DVDs, or as intelligent on-line agents (called avatars), and how these experiences can support STEM learning. Young children form strong relationships with their favorite characters. These characters can be used as positive role models for children and also have the potential to provide continuity for children as they are exposed to math and science in different environments (e.g., home, school). The guidelines and principles derived from this work should help policy makers, educators, and companies make better use of the media characters that pervade the daily experiences of children to improve STEM education.