Postdoctoral Fellowship: STEMEdIPRF: Looking Beyond Screen Time: Exploring the Relationship Between Diverse Media Experience, Educational Expectations, and Learning in Children

As technology continues to advance and children begin using digital media devices at younger ages, it is essential to understand how early digital media experiences impact learning. While we know much about how children use various digital media devices, little is known about what children expect to learn from digital media and how those expectations, in turn, inform their actual learning.

This is important to understand as developmental science indicates what children already know and what they expect plays a crucial role in how they pay attention, explore, and learn from the world around them. Given the increasing use of technology to teach Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) subjects, both inside and outside the classroom, the proposed research intends to explore how early media experiences shape children’s expectations of learning from digital media devices and how those expectations impact their learning of STEM content.

The plan is to share the results of this research widely with the local community, aiming to help families design educational experiences tailored to the needs and challenges of children growing up in today’s tech-driven learning environment and ensuring learning from digital media devices is as effective as possible. The STEM Ed PRF postdoctoral program aims to support projects that advance the development of theories, knowledge, and practices in STEM education that will benefit learners and the broader community.

As technology advances and the age of first exposure to digital media decreases, it becomes imperative to evaluate how diverse media experiences impact learning. Despite extensive research characterizing children’s diverse media use, it remains unclear how these diverse experiences shape young children’s educational expectations to learn from digital media and how those expectations, in turn, influence their learning outcomes.

Given the increase in the use of technology to facilitate STEM learning in formal and informal learning environments (Vahidy, 2019) and a large body of research showing that expectations influence and guide learning (e.g., Brod & Shing, 2022; Persaud et al., 2019; 2021; Stahl & Feigenson, 2015; 2017; see Brod & Shing, 2016 for further review), it is important to examine how diverse media experiences relate to children’s expectations to learn from media devices and how those expectations influence their STEM learning outcomes. Using a combination of behavioral, physiological, and computational approaches, this project intends to 1) examine the contextual factors that might shape children’s expectations about the educational value of digital media devices, 2) investigate if science learning outcomes differ based on children’s endorsement of digital media as a learning tool, 3) test whether children’s science learning from media can be impacted by simple one-time instructions to use a digital media device “to learn” versus “just for fun,” and 4) explore whether explicit trial-by-trial instructions can change children’s media expectations, increasing the likelihood that children will endorse diverse media as tools for learning.

The goal of this research program, integrating educational media, cognitive development, computational modeling, and physiological measures, is to encourage the use of underutilized analytical toolkits to answer existing empirical questions and create new ones about the interplay between children’s diverse media experiences, media beliefs, and STEM learning, ultimately contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of children’s media-based learning.

This project is funded by the STEM Education Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (STEM Ed PRF) program that aims to enhance the research knowledge, skills, and practices of recent doctorates in STEM, STEM education, education, and related disciplines to advance their preparation to engage in fundamental and applied research that advances knowledge within the field.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.