Screen Time and Literacy: Worry, Hope and New Ideas

Since 2005, the amount of time that young children from 6 months to 6 years old spend reading or being read to has dropped by 10 minutes, according to new data released yesterday. The number of minutes those children spend with screen media has increased by 42 minutes.

This discrepancy, and some counterintuitive findings by race and ethnicity, are the subject of a Huffington Post article I posted yesterday. Here’s an excerpt:

On a typical day more than 30 percent of children in this age group are not getting the experience of reading or being read to. That’s nearly one in three children who are not exposed to books on a typical day … Given what research has taught us about the importance of daily exposure to reading for a child’s reading comprehension and fluency in later years, and given the worrisome reading achievement gaps in the United States, this number should give us pause.

The data comes via a survey commissioned by Common Sense Media, a non-profit children’s advocacy organization that publishes a website of media ratings for parents.

Proponents of digital literacy may ask: Couldn’t those minutes with screen media have included reading or being read stories on a screen? When parents answered this survey — which was administered online to a panel of 1,300 randomly chosen parents around the country, including those who do not use computers at home — they were not given a chance to say whether reading occurred on a screen or with a traditional book. They simply answered questions about how much time their children were “reading or read to” the day before they took the survey.  So it’s hard to know whether these reading numbers might look a little better if parents were asked explicitly to consider online reading as much as physical, in-your-lap reading of the printed word. It’s also unclear whether parents, particularly those of the kindergartners and first-graders in the sample, actually know how much their children are reading when they are on a computer.

Still, the numbers are worth dwelling on because they beg a larger question: Could media itself be harnessed to improve reading and literacy, instead of becoming a seeming substitute for those activities? On this blog we’ve written about the promising findings from television shows designed to instill reading skills among young learners. New research using interactive media is underway with the help of the U.S. Department of Education’s Ready to Learn grants. And this week, a report about another opportunity came to the fore: Marilyn Jager Adams, an expert on children’s literacy and professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences at Brown University, has written a paper for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center on how speech-recognition-based reading systems may offer some technically viable approaches to ensuring that more children in this country receive help in reading fluently. (We’ll be delving into this paper, which is not yet online, in a subsequent post.)

Digital media has become an integral part of young children’s lives; this new data reminds us of just how much. But, as explained in a Time article, learning to read is still considered an essential foundation for a child’s later success in life. We need to keep pressing for answers to help the many children who are still struggling to build that foundation.