Using Public Media to Support Early Learning and School Readiness

Introduction

Public media for children can serve as a widely available support for early learning—and has done so for decades. Its reach is enormous: Nearly every American household can receive free broadcast television programming, allowing public media to reach more young children and their caregivers than any other children’s television network. Public media also is easy for families to find, and has attained high brand recognition through iconic series such as Sesame Street and Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, which further promotes its reach to families as the most accessible educational content outside of formal schooling. Recently, public media has come to encompass much more than television, as its content has adapted to digital platforms and the growing recognition that learning occurs within a larger community context. The educational goals have shifted and deepened, expanding beyond early efforts to support basic reading, numeracy, and social and emotional development, and now span a larger range of early academic skills and concepts, as well as connecting more intentionally than before to diverse audiences and meeting community needs. Because public media does not depend on advertising or commercial interests for funding, it can be driven entirely by educational goals and therefore provides a unique informal opportunity for supporting children’s learning. Public media is increasingly going beyond the typical scope of commercially developed educational media, innovating new ways of using highly intentional, research-based design frameworks that include key stakeholders and their relevant needs, cultural norms, structures, and routines.

Children under the age of eight from across the socioeconomic spectrum spend an average of two and a half hours each day using or watching media (Rideout & Robb, 2020), making the potential of freely available public media a critical part of everyday learning. PBS KIDS is also more popular on air and online with families from historically marginalized and underserved backgrounds (Nielsen Company, 2014). These patterns of digital media use intensified during the pandemic, particularly as communities suffering from underconnectivity replaced typical and remote school learning with educational media. In a recent survey by Katz and Rideout (2021), most parents rated educational TV shows, videos, or games as “very helpful” in maintaining learning during the pandemic, and Black children were more frequent users than were White or Hispanic children. Furthermore, children in households with incomes below the federal poverty level were the most frequent users of educational TV shows and videos. The trust in the quality of public media in a crowded educational media marketplace led to nearly a quarter of parents naming a PBS KIDS resource as an example of what their children used to continue learning during the pandemic, as compared to only a tenth of parents naming a Nickelodeon, Disney, or Netflix resource. This further demonstrates the broad and unique potential of intentional, research-based public media for supporting school readiness.

Educational media interventions are highly scalable and extremely low-cost, especially relative to other early childhood interventions that are typically person-to-person and resource intensive (Kearney & Levine, 2019). However, public media is not an effective school readiness intervention by virtue of being public or by virtue of being media. Intentional development and design of both the media and supports for children’s use of the media, incorporating developmentally-based research, lead to high-quality public media with evidence of effectiveness for learning across generations, settings, and demographics. This complex process stands in contrast to the minimal and typically user-facing market research that many commercially available educational technology developers use, which ignores how and what children actually learn from engaging with the resources. To develop and implement high-quality educational resources requires substantial time and money for iterative design and evaluation, including ensuring that the media aligns to learning sciences research about how children learn. Moreover, the dissemination of these resources to ensure that children and families use them in ways that will promote desired outcomes, including reinforcing content across contexts over time and through social interactions, is a constant challenge in need of creative solutions.