Early Childhood Educators’ Use of Math-Based Digital Media to Support Children’s Social-Emotional Skill Development

• In Event: 3-244 - Social-Emotional Learning in the Context of Mathematical Engagement in Preschool Classrooms

Integrative Statement

Exposure to educational media, such as broadcast television programming and online interactives, can have positive impacts on children’s cognitive, academic and social-emotional skills (CPB, 2011; Kirkorian, Wartella, & Anderson, 2008; McCarthy, Li, Tiu, & Atienza, 2013). While many early childhood educators struggle with how to incorporate transmedia resources into their classrooms, some studies have shown that these materials can be effectively utilized by teachers to facilitate children’s interest, engagement, and learning in content areas such as mathematics (CPB, 2016; Author, 2017). Previous research has linked mathematics learning to the development of social-emotional skills, such as self-regulation, help-seeking, and persistence (McClelland et al, 2007). The current study sought to understand how educational media - in particular, digital media - might be used by early childhood educators not only to support children’s mathematics learning, but also to foster their social-emotional skills development.

Participating early childhood educators (n = 15) were provided with six math-related digital media resources (three online games and three digital storybooks) that were designed to incorporate the following social-emotional skills: calming down when upset, asking for help when faced with a problem, helping others, persisting through challenges, and taking turns. Teachers were asked to incorporate the digital media naturalistically in their classrooms, as much or as little as they wanted to over the course of 3-4 months (depending on when they joined the study). Teachers were encouraged to use each online resource at least once over the course of the study, and to draw the children’s attention to relevant social-emotional skills, as appropriate. Teachers filled out a digital media usage log once a month, which included an open-ended prompt asking them to describe how they used the six online resources to support children’s social-emotional skills development. Their responses were qualitatively coded for presence/absence of social-emotional skills mentioned in relation to the prompt.

Survey results indicated that teachers were most likely to use the six digital media resources with children to discuss taking turns or working collaboratively (Table 1). The online games tended to facilitate discussions about taking turns and working together to solve problems, whereas the digital storybooks supported conversations around a range of social-emotional topics (Table 2). The online games were more open-ended, and required interactive participation, which teachers were able to leverage towards social-emotional skills that children could physically demonstrate like taking turns and working together. In contrast, the narrative format of the digital storybooks lent itself to more cognitive social emotional skills that could be discussed with children, such as talking about one’s feelings, and various strategies for self-regulation, help-seeking, and problem-solving. Although the digital storybooks included images that moved when readers clicked on them, they were linear stories with one path from beginning to end. Yet they also allowed the reader to pause and think, whereas gameplay required action. Thus, both types of online media had different affordances for addressing social-emotional skills. These results have implications for the intentional design of children’s digital media to support educators in discussing and modeling social-emotional skills with children.

Author

• Camellia Sanford-Dolly, Rockman et al
  Presenting Author