Television, Games, and Mathematics: Effects of Children’s Interactions with Multiple Media

Theoretical Background

Our study of children’s cross-platform learning is grounded in the theoretical and empirical literature on transfer of learning – students’ ability to apply concepts or skills acquired in one context to a new problem or context. The literature has documented many different types of transfer of learning (for example Haskell [2001] distinguished among 14 types of transfer), and numerous theoretical mechanisms have been offered to explain how and why they occur (e.g., Gentner, 1983; Greeno, Moore, & Smith, 1993; Holyoak, 1985; Salomon & Perkins, 1989; Schwartz, Bransford, & Sears, 2005).

Particularly relevant to our research is the principle, adopted by several existing theories, that transfer can be elicited through varied practice (i.e., providing learners with multiple examples of the same concept or repeated practice of a skill in multiple contexts). Varied practice helps learners create a generalized mental representation of the material that is less context dependent, and more easily applied to new tasks and situations (e.g., Gick & Holyoak, 1983; Salomon & Perkins, 1989; Singley & Anderson, 1989). For informal education, we hypothesize that encountering similar content (e.g., a mathematical concept or problem-solving heuristic) in multiple contexts and media would lead, not only to a better grasp of the content, but also a greater likelihood of transfer to new problems as well.