Iteration and Accountability in Designing Educational Media-based Family Programming

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 3:20 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Affordances and Challenges in Developing, Implementing, and Researching a Digital Media-Based Family Program (Table 7)

Abstract

In the first paper, media developers introduce [Program], the educational multimedia program implemented and researched by the presenters of Papers Two and Three. [Program] is a series of four sessions that 5–8-year-old children and their caregivers participate in together at local community organizations. The program includes an animated educational television show and digital and hands-on activities that highlight three curricular pillars: executive function (EF) skills, self-regulation strategies, and career exposure. Each session centers on one EF skill, such as flexible thinking, planning and prioritizing, or task initiation and persistence (Zelazo et al., 2017). Together, families learn and practice self-regulation strategies that support EF skills during difficult situations - as they apply to everyday life as well as future careers.

Media-based educational content has skyrocketed in the past decade, in part because it allows greater access, understanding, and engagement (Dalton, 2017). Family programs that incorporate educational media are part of a holistic approach to education, in which connected and intergenerational learning is integral (Ito et al., 2013), and learning can occur outside the constraints placed on formal learning contexts. In designing such a program, we sought to carefully balance between providing all the resources that are needed to successfully run it with fidelity while also maintaining flexibility for communities to extend, improvise, and remediate it based on families’ situated needs and interests. Here, we detail program developers’ iterative design process, beginning with a national needs assessment that included surveys, interviews, and focus groups with 713 caregivers and 111 educators total. Next, we formatively tested all content with 1,528 children, and implemented three rounds of formative program testing with families across the United States, including 100 children, 76 caregivers, and 14 educators. Paper One describes how this iterative design process allowed us to integrate child, caregiver, and educator feedback into the program content, structure, and training, building up to the case studies presented in Papers Two and Three.

This process of centering community voices during program development is part of our greater work to remediate and repair the relationships among program developers, researchers, and the communities we serve. Here, we introduce our broader relationship-building guidelines, which were born out of our efforts to infuse equity, remedy, and repair work into our research processes and relationships and hold ourselves accountable to this work (Authors, Date).

Together, the iterative design process and relationship-building guidelines provide the context that shaped the case studies presented in Papers Two and Three, which illustrate two approaches to infusing participatory design elements within varying contexts and the constraints and affordances of digital media within these spaces.

Author

• Bryce Larkin Chessell Becker, Twin Cities PBS