The U.S. Department of Education’s Ready To Learn (RTL) initiative funds (a) mass media and related community outreach intended to promote school readiness among all children—especially at-risk populations—, and (b) formative and summative research by third party evaluators (Michael Cohen Group, 2012). Today, the majority of American preschoolers have consumed RTL media, and RTL has become one of the largest funders of educational media research (Corporation for Public Broadcasting [CPB] & Public Broadcasting Service [PBS], 2011). This dissertation primarily aimed to assess RTL’s short- and long-term effectiveness in promoting school readiness, specifically foundational literacy skills. As a secondary goal, this dissertation also sought to shed insight into methodological and theoretical issues concerning children’s learning from media more broadly. Article 1 provides a meta-analytic review of the accumulated research on the short-term effectiveness of RTL’s literacy-themed media. Results indicate that RTL media resulted in small but positive impacts on children’s early literacy skills, comparable to comprehensive early childcare programs such as Head Start (Kay & Pennucci, 2014), but considerably smaller than targeted nonmediated literacy interventions, such as in-person phonics instruction (Langenberg et al., 2000). Article 2 outlines how a developmental researcher might re-recruit families who participated in research studies, such as early childhood RTL evaluations, for later research. It highlights newer technological tools that facilitate locating participants who moved between waves of data collection and scheduling them for follow-up sessions (e.g., people-centric search engines built on algorithms that scrape the Internet for publicly available contact information). Researchers conducting non-prospective longitudinal, prospective longitudinal, or even cross-sectional research could benefit from many of these strategies. Article 3 builds on Articles 1 and 2. Preschool and kindergarten students who participated in one of the evaluations included in the Article 1 meta-analysis were re-recruited for a follow-up study six years later, using recruitment strategies detailed in Article 2. Children were in preschool and kindergarten during the original intervention, and were in 5th and 6th grade at follow-up testing. Children completed age-appropriate literacy assessments, and their parents provided complementary survey data. Findings suggested the effects of early exposure to RTL media sustained into middle childhood, but only for children who had below and above average literacy skills in early childhood prior to the original intervention. These findings are interpreted in light of the Early Learning Hypothesis, and the Traveling Lens, Capacity, and Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects Models. Altogether, these results provide relatively positive support in favor of the continued funding of RTL, and speak to larger theoretical debates concerning children’s learning from media. Continued monitoring is warranted, as the specific foci and execution of the RTL initiative has evolved across grant cycles.

Last modified

• 03/29/2018

Creator

• Lisa B. Hurwitz

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2D68B

Subject

• Media, Technology and Society

Keyword

• Longitudinal
• Intervention
• Educational Media
• Ready To Learn
• Early Learning Hypothesis
• Individual Differences

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright