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Report to the CPB-PBS Ready To Learn Initiative
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Parents in the PBS KIDS group reported that they were more likely to watch videos and play games together with
their children, and connect educational media with lived experience; they also reported increased confidence in
supporting mathematics learning. All of these are positive signs for leveraging public media in support of early
learning. These differences in behavior may have resulted from exposure to the study resources, which included
specific information for parents about target math concepts, using technology to support learning, and engaging
in media viewing and playing with children. By providing this information in short and relatively accessible formats
(video and print information), parents were supported with enough information to engage fully with their child with the
media and interact around target math skills. In addition, the study sought to maintain parent engagement through
text and phone call reminders about study activities, adding to a small body of work demonstrating positive effects of
communicating regularly with parents, and sharing easy-to-receive, useful strategies for parents to engage with their
children’s learning (York & Loeb, 2014).
The study intervention was premised on the assumption that mediation of transmedia content is essential to maximize
the educational potential of these resources. In the design of this study, mediation took the form of (a) selecting,
curating, and sequencing developmentally appropriate PEG+CAT content aligned to valued early mathematical skills,
and (b) providing resources to enable an adult to jointly engage with media with children and through that joint
engagement, provide focus and make explicit the target learning goals for children. How to engage adults and help
them to guide their children is a challenge that developers of transmedia must address, and further research targeting
effective approaches to providing this support, such as modeling parenting strategies, will benefit children, their
parents, and the overarching goal of connecting home and formal learning environments.
Family Engagement with PEG+CAT
Families’ positive responses to and consistent engagement with media experiences, as well as the lack of a
relationship between demographic characteristics and engagement, suggest that PEG+CAT appealed broadly to
children and families in our sample, regardless of language or ethnic group. Parents and families were motivated to
engage with study experiences and did so in high numbers. However, as one might expect in home environments,
which are casual and varied, families engaged with the materials in highly idiosyncratic ways (in terms of frequency
and sequence of experiences) that challenged the traditional ways that researchers typically consider fidelity and
adherence to an intervention.
Results also suggest some implications for the design of the media experience. In particular, the degree of variation
among treatment families—how much and in what order they chose to engage with the PEG+CAT media—is
noteworthy because it brings into focus the question of how much the sequencing or ordering of particular resources
matters when it comes to the acquisition of particular skills, like knowledge of 3-D shapes.
The research team was exacting in the selection of PEG+CAT videos and games that focused on target skills and
used strategies known to make educational media most effective. Researchers organized these resources into an
adventure, during which concepts were introduced and then reinforced over the duration of the study. While most
families did not follow the recommended sequence, children in the PBS KIDS group improved in their understanding of
certain mathematical skills, in contrast to children in a business as usual comparison group. Moreover, the PEG+CAT
