Kara Garrity is a fourth year doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, studying children and media at the Annenberg School for Communication. She received a B.A. in Psychology and English from Georgetown University in 2008. Kara is primarily interested in exploring the aspects of children’s television that maximize learning in an effort to enhance the educational value of the media. In addition, she would like to examine the efficacy of applying such research in the classroom to supplement existing curriculum and employ a variety of presentations in a way that makes learning fun. This technique could be particularly useful for low income children, who enter school with less knowledge and fewer skills than their more advantaged peers, a gap that only increases as they move through the grades. Educational media in the classroom could help to minimize or even eliminate this gap, and educational media at home could prepare children so that the gap never even develops.
|
