On January 24, an American survey of 1,500 parents of kids 2-10 by The Joan Ganz Cooney Center, founded by Sesame Workshop, tells us that 57% of these parents believes their children learn significantly from educational media. The parents also state that learning from mobile devices falls short when compared to other platforms.

The study, Learning at Home: Families’ Educational Media Use in America, speaks of a drop in educational media use after the earliest years.

As screen media use goes up, the proportion devoted to educational content goes down, from 78% of all screen media among 2-4-year-olds to 39% among 5-7-year-olds to 27% among 8-10-year-olds.

Remember; at a young age the parents provide the choice of media, but as soon as the child gets to choose, things change dramatically. Key is creating and providing higher quality and more fun media, as it tells us that non educational content is more fun. I wonder why there has been so little improvement in for example e-books for children, there are of course exceptions, but mostly they still show pretty primitive animations. Kids will not settle for that, not anymore.

I agree with Dr. Michael H. Levine, the Center’s exec director. “As we work to raise education standards and improve students’ success, we must provide higher quality media options-especially on mobile-that will help engage and educate today’s older children.”

Among other key findings:

–  2-4-year olds spend more time per day on educational media than any other age group – 1 hr, 16 mins compared with 50 minutes for 5-7-yr-olds and 42 minutes for 8-10-yr-olds.

–  Television continues to dominate, with children spending an average 42 minutes a day with educational TV compared to 5 minutes with educational content on mobile devices and computers and 3 minutes with educational video games.

–  39% of parents say their child has learned “a lot” about any subject from mobile compared to 52% for TV.

–  Children are reading an average 40 minutes per day, including 29 minutes with print, 8 minutes on computers, and 5 minutes using e-platforms.

–  There are significant differences among racial groups. Both African-American (60%) and Hispanic-Latino (52%) parents are more likely than White (37%) parents to consider interactive media a very or somewhat important source for the lessons their children most need to learn.