Learning Landscapes: Playing the Way to Learning and Engagement in Public Spaces

A hop, skip and a jump towards evaluating social interaction and learning through play at a child and adolescent inpatient treatment program

BACKGROUND

The number of inpatient mental health facilities for children and adolescents in the United States is growing rapidly. While undergoing inpatient treatment, children and adolescents can benefit from innovative play opportunities designed to foster social interaction and learning.

METHODS

The Playful Learning Landscapes (PLL) initiative is a group of projects designed to transform everyday spaces into opportunities for playful learning. As a part of this initiative, two designs-Lifesize Ruler and Jumping Feet-were installed in an inpatient mental health facility for children and adolescents in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States.

RESULTS

Results of pre-installation and post-installation naturalistic observations suggested that social interactions, the use of STEM-related language and 21st century skills, including confidence, increased after interacting with the installations.

CONCLUSIONS

While previous research on PLL projects has demonstrated the efficacy of transforming public spaces into places for playful learning, this research provides support that, even in private, targeted settings, using a trauma-informed approach, children and adolescents, can reap the benefits of playful learning.

Ecological contexts associated with early childhood curiosity: Neighborhood safety, home and parenting quality, and socioeconomic status

Introduction

Curiosity is an important social-emotional process underlying early learning. Our previous work found a positive association between higher curiosity and higher academic achievement at kindergarten, with a greater magnitude of benefit for children with socioeconomic disadvantage. Because characteristics of the early caregiving and physical environment impact the processes that underlie early learning, we sought to examine early environmental experiences associated with early childhood curiosity, in hopes of identifying modifiable contexts that may promote its expression.

Methods

Using data from a nationally representative sample of 4,750 children from the United States, this study examined the association of multi-level ecological contexts (i.e., neighborhood safety, parenting quality, home environment, and center-based preschool enrollment) on early childhood curiosity at kindergarten, and tested for moderation by socioeconomic status.

Results

In adjusted, stratified models, children from lower-resourced environments (characterized by the lowest-SES tertile) manifested higher curiosity if they experienced more positive parenting, higher quality home environments, and if they lived in "very safe" neighborhoods.

Discussion

We discuss the ecological contexts (i.e., parenting, home, and neighborhood environments) that are promotive of early childhood curiosity, with an emphasis on the role of the neighborhood safety and the "neighborhood built environment" as important modifiable contexts to foster early childhood curiosity in lower-resourced families.

Parent–child interaction during a home STEM activity and children’s handwashing behaviors

We examined correlations between a home-based STEM activity illustrating the importance of soap use during handwashing and children’s (4-to 7-year-olds, N = 81, 42 girls, 39 boys) use of soap when washing their hands. Parents and children either participated in or watched the activity. Children reflected on the activity immediately afterward and a week later. Parent–child interaction during participation related to the frequency of unprompted soap use during handwashing, controlling for performance on other, related cognitive measures. Children whose parents were more goal-directed, and set goals for the interaction, were less likely to use soap spontaneously when handwashing in the subsequent week. The amount of causal knowledge children generated when they reflected on the experience immediately afterward also influenced whether children used soap when washing their hands. Reducing the autonomy children believe they have during a STEM-based activity potentially leads them to not engage in a behavior related to the activity on their own. Overall, these data suggest that parent–child interaction during STEM activities can influence the ways children encode and engage with those activities in their everyday lives. Given that the ways children wash their hands might mitigate the spread of disease, interventions that focus on providing children with the belief that STEM activities are for them might be broadly beneficial to society.

Daily television exposure, parent conversation during shared television viewing and socioeconomic status: Associations with curiosity at kindergarten

OBJECTIVE

To examine the main and interactive effects of the amount of daily television exposure and frequency of parent conversation during shared television viewing on parent ratings of curiosity at kindergarten, and to test for moderation by socioeconomic status (SES).

STUDY DESIGN

Sample included 5100 children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort. Hours of daily television exposure and frequency of parent screen-time conversation were assessed from a parent interview at preschool, and the outcome of early childhood curiosity was derived from a child behavior questionnaire at kindergarten. Multivariate linear regression examined the main and interactive effects of television exposure and parent screen-time conversation on kindergarten curiosity and tested for moderation by SES.

RESULTS

In adjusted models, greater number of hours of daily television viewing at preschool was associated with lower curiosity at kindergarten (B = -0.14, p = .008). More frequent parent conversation during shared screen-time was associated with higher parent-reported curiosity at kindergarten with evidence of moderation by SES. The magnitude of association between frequency of parent conversation during television viewing and curiosity was greater for children from low SES environments, compared to children from high SES environments: (SES ≤ median): B = 0.29, p < .001; (SES > median): B = 0.11, p < .001.

CONCLUSIONS

Higher curiosity at kindergarten was associated with greater frequency of parent conversation during shared television viewing, with a greater magnitude of association in low-SES families. While the study could not include measures of television program content, digital media use and non-screen time conversation, our results suggest the importance of parent conversation to promote early childhood curiosity, especially for children with socioeconomic disadvantage.

Brief Interventions Influence the Quantity and Quality of Caregiver-Child Conversations in an Everyday Context

Reading and arithmetic are difficult cognitive feats for children to master and youth from low-income communities are often less “school ready” in terms of letter and number recognition skills (Lee and Burkam, 2002). One way to prepare children for school is by encouraging caregivers to engage children in conversations about academically-relevant concepts by using numbers, recognizing shapes, and naming colors (Levine et al., 2010; Fisher et al., 2013). Previous research shows that caregiver-child conversations about these topics rarely take place in everyday contexts (Hassinger-Das et al., 2018), but interventions designed to encourage such conversations, like displaying signs in a grocery store, have resulted in significant increases in caregiver-child conversations (Ridge et al., 2015; Hanner et al., 2019). We investigated whether a similar brief intervention could change caregiver-child conversations in an everyday context. We observed 212 families in a volunteer-run facility where people who are food-insecure can select food from available donations. Volunteers greet all the clients as they pass through the aisles, offer food, and restock the shelves as needed. About 25% of the clients have children with them and our data consist of observations of the caregiver-child conversations with 2- to 10-year-old children. Half of the observation days consisted of a baseline condition in which the quantity and quality of caregiver-child conversation was observed as the client went through aisles where no signs were displayed, and volunteers merely greeted the clients. The other half of the observation days consisted of a brief intervention where signs were displayed (signs-up condition), where, volunteers greeted the clients and pointed out that there were signs displayed to entertain the children if they were interested. In addition, there was a within-subject manipulation for the intervention condition where each family interacted with two different categories of signs. Half of the signs had academically-relevant content and the other half had non-academically-relevant content. The results demonstrate that the brief intervention used in the signs-up condition increases the quantity of conversation between a caregiver and child. In addition, signs with academically-relevant content increases the quality of the conversation. These findings provide further evidence that brief interventions in an everyday context can change the caregiver-child conversation. Specifically, signs with academically-relevant content may promote school readiness.

Element Enterprise Tycoon: Playing Board Games to Learn Chemistry in Daily Life

This article reports the design of a scientific board game, named “Element Enterprise Tycoon” (EET), which creates a scenario combining chemical elements, techniques, and products in daily life. The game cards are designed to motivate students not only to retrieve information about chemical elements, but also to be proficient in chemistry. Moreover, the game creates opportunities for group interactions and competitions to engage students in learning chemical elements as they do in regular science curricula. The EET has been field-tested with a group of middle school students to evaluate its applicability. Empirical data show that students improve their understanding of chemistry concepts with a median level of effect size. In particular, students achieve better performance in terms of chemistry-related technique concepts. The follow-up interviews reflect students’ positive feedback and attitudes toward science learning through board game playing and their willingness to continue to play the game. It is suggested that learning through science games can indeed help students learn new chemical knowledge.