James Paul Gee & Michael Levine

TV Guidance
Educators should embrace—not castigate—video games and TV.

I t has been 25 years since the landmark

education study “A Nation at Risk.” But even after the resulting hundreds of
billions of dollars spent trying to ramp up children’s mastery of basic skills,
American school performance is, tragically, stuck in wet cement. Millions of
children, including the majority of low-income students, are behind in the most
important predictor of future achievement: fourth-grade reading. Unfortunately,
the current approach to the literacy crisis is locked in a time warp, almost totally
removed from the ubiquitous digital media consumption that currently drives
children’s lives. Unless we change course fast to integrate literacy and digital
culture, our current educational paradigm and policies will make academic
achievement gains even more difficult in the decade ahead.

james paul gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy
Studies at Arizona State University. michael levine is executive director of
the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and a senior associate at
Yale University’s Zigler Center.

48 spring 2009

 Why is fourth grade such a critical time? When children fall behind in the
early grades they tend to stagnate at a critical moment, facing what the Harvard
educational psychologist and literacy pioneer Jeanne Chall famously called the
“fourth grade reading slump,” constraining children from moving on to under-
stand the academic and more complex language of a wide variety of content
domains. International comparisons show that in part because of these early lit-
eracy setbacks, we are losing the global race in science and math education, areas
central for twenty-first-century skilled jobs. Early literacy abilities have become
a vital “gateway” for high-skill work that increasingly requires all high-wage
workers in the global economy to understand scientific and increasingly techni-
cal materials. While other nations have raced ahead since the 1980s, our weak
educational performance has confirmed our status as a nation still at risk.
But instead of preparing for new needs with modern technologies, programs
like No Child Left Behind have turned many of our schools into test-prep acad-
emies that are focused on standardized skill sets, in a world that demands higher-
level thinking. With the most tech-savvy administration ever now in office, we
need a new strategy that relies on the untapped power of digital media. Much
like how the computer chip helped define our information age and multiplied
productivity in the past two decades, media technologies can help transform
children from the bored, reluctant learners of today to an excited, engaged, and
creative twenty-first-century workforce of tomorrow.

The New Innovation Skills

Some observers, including the National Endowment of Humanities, have argued
that popular digital media like video games are at least partially to blame for the
literacy crisis in America. Kids today, they claim, are wasting their time play-
ing games when they should be reading. But a more realistic approach must
use children’s natural inclinations to embrace digital media—including video
games, mobile devices, and virtual worlds—and acknowledge that such tools
might be a missing link for possible breakthroughs in solving the fourth-grade
reading slump.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, children as young as eight years
old are spending an average of six hours a day on media consumption. Many
children, who are just learning to read, including those who are struggling
at school, play video games like Pokemon, where they must learn to read the
polysyllabic names and descriptions of hundreds of creatures. For example, in
a description of the creature “Shuckle,” they will see language like, “[Shuckle]
stores berries in its shell. The berries eventually ferment to become delicious
juices.” This language is more complex than what a first-grader will see in

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school for some time. Indeed, scholars like Rebecca Black have shown that many
kids, including those who are English language learners, are becoming more
immersed in writing through online fan fiction sites for popular titles, such as
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter or Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are,
than they are in school.
Digital media hold great promise to speak to our educational problems in two
important respects. First, they can move learning from being “book-centered” to
being “experience-centered,” while improving reading skills. Biology, for example,
is not first and foremost about words, but about actions in and around the world.
So why should its education be limited to textbooks? Second, digital tools today
are the foundation of what we might call “passion” or “professional-amateur”
(pro-am) communities. Today, many young people are using the Internet and
other digital media to become “amateur experts”—sometimes rivaling traditional
experts trained in more traditional ways—in a great variety of domains. They
use the Internet, communication media, digital tools, and membership in often
virtual, sometimes real, communities to develop expertise in different areas such
as digital video, games, storytelling, machinima (making movies from video-
game engines), fan fiction, history and civilization simulations, music, political
commentary, fashion design, and nearly every other endeavor the human mind
can imagine. They join with others around a shared passion—as opposed to age,
race, gender, or class—to learn and practice important twenty-first-century skills.
These pro-am communities—and the ways in which they are organized—hold
out promise as new sites for closing our literacy, digital, and knowledge gaps, if
we can learn to use them well for all our young people.

Preventing the Fourth-Grade Slump

President Barack Obama’s emphasis on building high-quality preschools and
early-intervention programs is right, but none of that investment will pay off
unless we follow through with a new approach in the early grades. American
schools resemble a football team that keeps losing because it plays poorly in
the second quarter. While the country has strongly emphasized the need for all
children to learn to decode print in the early grades, it has not dealt sufficiently
with the fourth-grade slump. Many students who appear to be learning to read
well in the early years of school cannot “read to learn”—i.e., use written texts to
master content in areas such as science, mathematics, social studies, and litera-
ture—by the fourth grade. From then on, they are always playing catch up.
What leads to the fourth-grade slump? It is not caused just by poor early
“decoding” instruction (learning to match letters and sounds, a skill that has
tended to be stressed in current educational policies), since many children who

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can decode adequately still fall victim to it. Probably the most important cause
of the slump is language, or mastery of vocabulary. As school progresses, the
language of learning (for content areas) becomes more complex and special-
ized, and less like everyday conversational language. What gives students a good
running head start to engage this complex language is a wide-ranging, sturdy
vocabulary of words introduced before school entry. Unfortunately, we don’t
teach early literacy in a way that provides most students with that vocabulary
if they don’t already have it.
The complex language associated with school success is often called “aca-
demic language.” Different academic subject areas and disciplines use differ-
ent varieties of academic language, and academic language itself is just one
type of specialist language. Specialist varieties of language are used in many
workplaces, institutions, and profes-
sions such as law, medicine, and busi-
American schools resemble a
ness. For success in school, students
need to acquire lots of words that are football team that keeps losing
used regularly across academic areas because it plays poorly in the
(words like “maintain” and “process”),
as well as technical terms used more
second quarter.
narrowly (words like “nucleus” and
“legislature”). Such words are mainstays of the classroom and of books, but do
not occur regularly in everyday conversation.
As school proceeds, content for students is increasingly couched in academic
language. In the twenty-first century, academic knowledge is being increasingly
applied to complex systems—systems such as the environment, the economy,
even weather. In the future, learning of “content” will increasingly mean work-
ing with others collaboratively to pool disciplinary knowledge and tools.
If we are to teach literacy in ways that prevent the fourth-grade slump and
make all children adept at academic language and school content, then the
preschool and middle childhood period—roughly ages four to 10—is absolutely
crucial. It is during this time that children are making the transition from learn-
ing to read to reading to learn and, we now hope, reading to discover. It is during
this time when children’s background knowledge and vocabulary development
are set in motion, when the foundations are laid for meeting the demands of
comprehending and using academic language connected to content. If these
foundations are not well set, young people cannot successfully navigate high
school, let alone graduate from college.
One key reason that some children are successful in school with academic
language is their early, home-based preparation. Many successful students enter

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kindergarten with a large and varied vocabulary acquired through regular dia-
logue with parents or grandparents, being read to frequently, and exposure to
a wide variety of experiences in the world.
Beyond such practices, Kevin Crowley, an expert on out-of-school learning,
has studied how young children develop “islands of expertise,” which he defines
as “any topic in which children happen to become interested in.” One example
is a boy who develops a “sophisticated conversational space” about trains and
related topics after he is given a Thomas the Tank Engine book and is supported
in his interests by a tuned-in, guiding adult.
Many students today, especially from low-income families, do not get these
sorts of early language-based preparation for schooling. Although billions of dol-
lars have been spent developing and administering reading intervention programs
for four-to-nine year olds under No Child Left Behind and Title I, these policies
have made scant progress and have failed to fundamentally improve reading skills,
especially the skills that lead to mastering school-based content.

Closing Two Gaps at Once

If we do not get the transition from early schooling to later schooling right so that
all young people have a solid foundation for learning language and content, we
will face two educational gaps—an old reading gap and a new digital gap—both
detrimental to our success as a leading nation.
These two gaps intersect. The old reading gap can only worsen as the high-
tech world makes larger and more complex demands on literacy and content
learning. At the same time, the old reading gap prevents certain children from
meeting these demands. What exactly is the connection between digital media
on the one hand, and literacy, content learning, and complex academic language
on the other?
Put simply, digital media—video games, simulations, modeling tools, hand-
held devices, and media production tools—can allow students to do two fun-
damentally important things. First, they can see how complex language and
other symbol systems attach to the world. We can put kids into virtual worlds
and let them engage in goal-based interactions with others. Consider the
video game Dimenxian from Tabula Digita, in which children use an algebraic
Cartesian coordinate system to allow their avatar to navigate the landscape
and eventually construct coordinate systems to map their environment and
solve algebraic problems in the virtual world. They have to “algebratize” the
world to play the game, and the game world gives them constant feedback
and mentoring. They now have vivid images and actions associated with alge-
braic symbols that give them “situated meanings”—that is, meanings tied to

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experiences they can remember when they need to use coordinate systems for
further problem-solving.
Second, young people can use digital media to produce knowledge and to
display, argue for, and demonstrate their learning. This can transform our tra-
ditional notions of assessment towards more genuine mastery of skill sets. Digi-
tal media can also combine assessment more intimately with teaching. When
media tools are used to track what learners do moment by moment, we can
study different trajectories toward mastery, give students constant feedback
based on this knowledge, and assess progress across time and not just in terms
of a one-off test.
Of course, in the best schools, kids have always learned not just out of books,
but also through technologically advanced media, greatly expanding the possi-
bilities available. In the past it was projectors and stand-alone computers; today,
young people still read books and textbooks, but through networked technologies
and interactive digital media, they can also interact directly with worlds previ-
ously described passively, and act with others to learn and produce knowledge.
During the past decade we have made giant leaps in children’s and educators’
access to digital technologies. Data from national studies conducted by the Kaiser
Family Foundation indicate that families across income and demographic cat-
egories now have access to the Internet, cell phones, and video game platforms
and that the amount of time spent on digital media for children out of school
has accelerated dramatically.
Formal education systems play an equalizing role in educational opportunity.
School connectivity to the Internet, for example, has grown enormously in the
past decade, due to policy and financing efforts such as E-Rate, which spent
approximately $16 billion to wire schools and libraries between 1998 and 2008.
Teens across income groups reported use of the Internet in school growing by
45 percent between 2000 and 2006. But policy failures such as a lack of effec-
tive technology integration into classrooms, and adult concern about media
distractions, has increasingly fragmented what children do at home and in the
school environment, often to the detriment of low-income kids. In other words,
it’s not enough to be digitally connected—schools, and their students, need to
know how to use those connections.

Three Policy Challenges

We must address three major policy challenges to prepare our children to enter
the globalized, automated, increasingly complex world. First, early reading
instruction will yield insufficient benefits if it does not prepare children for
later content learning. Our current approach is failing too many students who

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experience the avoidable fourth-grade reading slump. In addressing this fate-

ful indicator, three fundamental issues quickly arise: How do we ensure that all
children, not just those from highly educated homes, get good early prepara-
tion, not just for reading but for academic language as well? What do we do for
young people who have gotten past the early years of schooling, but are now on
a tragic path to academic failure? And, with the enormous growth in the number
of English language learners, how do we teach rigorously in the larger context
of multilingual language development?
Using new digital media for learning, supported by well-trained and com-
mitted adult guidance and instruction, can address all these questions at once.
Such media allow learners—young and old, behind or ahead in school, first- or
second-language speakers of English—to visualize and experience the mean-
ings of words, rather than just associ-
ate words with others that may not be
Digital media hold out the
understood in context. This can lead
potential to enhance the new to better preparation for future learn-
skills necessary for success ing, as well as deeper learning that
enhances problem-solving—and not
in a global age. just passing paper-and-pencil tests.
Second, addressing America’s sci-
ence, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) crisis must always include
language learning embedded in digital knowledge and skills beginning in the
early grades. Many people think that learning science has nothing to do with
language or literacy and everything to do with concepts and facts. However,
these subjects are accessible only through the language and other symbol sys-
tems they use to represent their concepts, content, and practices. And science
is not unique—this dependence on language is true of all academic domains and,
indeed, most professional domains. Furthermore, different academic domains
develop different forms of language and use different sorts of symbols. By the
time a student is in high school or college—not to mention a high-tech work-
place—the ability to handle complex forms of language and other symbol sys-
tems is crucial. It is an entry ticket into the forms of thinking, problem-solving,
and knowledge production that are the essences of higher-order skills today.
Third, new digital tools can transform learning and innovation if they are
wisely and equitably deployed. Simple access to digital media for learning will
not narrow achievement gaps. What is crucial is access to support and struc-
tured mentorship as well. In a recent study of high-end computers and reputable
learning software placed into libraries in economically diverse communities, it
was found that well-off parents accompanied their children to the library and

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mentored them to read at or above their reading levels, to sustain their engage-
ment with particular learning activities, and to do so in strategic ways. Poorer
families engaged much less in such mentoring, which means their children will
likely gain less school-based knowledge from digital media and print literacy,
read less well, be more passive in their activities, have less of a foundation to
build on, and thus fall further behind. In contrast, the more-well-off students
progressively build on their achievements. In this way, digital media—much like
print literacy—can make “the rich richer and the poor poorer.”
These findings do not mean that parents are the only effective source of
mentoring. Good digital media made for learning build into themselves impor-
tant mentoring devices such as well-ordered problems and artificial (virtual)
or real tutors. However, they can only be useful if parents, teachers, and more
advanced peers help children seek out good learning media and fruitfully draw
on their internal design features for learning.
The crucial issue is how to address new digital literacies—that is, expertise
with digital media as a form of communication and knowledge production—
without forgetting traditional literacy. America’s goal must be to close both the
reading gap and the digital gap at the same time and in ways that create learners
who are able to innovate and produce knowledge, not just recapitulate standard
answers on tests.
Digital media hold out the potential to enhance the new skills necessary for
success in a global age. They can integrate oral and written language and real-
world interactions as well as provide an enormous source of images, actions, and
dialogue, all of which help users learn to situate meanings in a great variety of
domains, including school subjects such as algebra, science, social studies, art,
and literature. They can help level the playing field for learners whose families
have not introduced them to a wealth of experiences connected to these domains.
In today’s marketplace, being tech-savvy, literate, and constantly learning new
content is the equation for learning to innovate.

The Digital Promise

Current early literacy practices and policies have cost tens of billions of dol-
lars over the past decade with almost no integration of the new digital tools
and teaching practices that have the potential to build the skills and knowl-
edge demanded by universities and employers in the twenty-first century. Of
course, this is a new area and more research is needed, but there is enough
agreement and pioneering models to show that digital media can have an
enormous impact on children’s learning. Three major policy steps can lever-
age their potential.

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Build a Digital Teacher Corps

Teachers cannot teach what they do not know. Unfortunately, the skill set needed
to modernize early literacy learning is not being transmitted in teacher educa-
tion programs in the United States. We need to radically transform the almost
Stone Age approach to using digital technologies in the preparation and profes-
sional development to transform classrooms for discovery and problem-solv-
ing. Teachers need to master content at much higher levels across vital STEM,
language, and literacy areas, and they need to learn to collaborate with other
educators and children to become guides of others’ learning, not mere conduits
of information or “storage.”
As a “down payment” on new teacher capacity, why not establish a Digital
Teachers Corps of some 6,000 literacy leaders, two for each of the 3,000 low-
est-performing school communities in the U.S. that all told serve approximately
three million learners? Modeled after other programs such as the North Carolina
Teaching Fellows, which has successfully recruited strong new teachers from
underserved minority groups, or Teach for America, which has a track record
of attracting the “best and brightest” young minds, the Corps would recruit
members from university-based preparation programs, community organiza-
tions, and technology-oriented businesses. They would be deployed initially to
integrate new digital content to reverse the fourth-grade reading slump, attack
the weak performance of English language learners on basic literacy problems,
and use new strategies to teach higher-level content in STEM subjects and
world languages.
Digital media can then enhance the development of teachers and can cre-
ate a new team of adults who would support children’s learning across school
and extended learning settings. Funds from the new infrastructure investments
in schools and libraries supported by the Obama Administration should be
accompanied by a new provision in the teacher-quality portions of the Higher
Education Act to support both the Corps idea and new online communities so
teachers can interact with each other and young people to mentor them. Games
and simulations can be used to teach and introduce rich content in areas for
which young children have a natural affinity, such as environmental issues and
civic participation.

Create a “Digital Place” in Every Community

Many elementary school children are gamers and emerging tech-savvy “digital
natives.” They crave engaging experiences with new technologies and want to
use digital tools that allow them to participate in learning communities. Their
evident skills usually outstrip those of adults around them, but they still need

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teaching applicable to the digital world. They often need help with evaluating
information available online and putting their tech skills to the most productive
uses. Kids’ enthusiasm for digital activities presents a great “hook” for teaching,
but if schools ignore the digital world, that world becomes reserved for home
and the resources only more privileged families can marshal.
Despite billions of dollars invested in infrastructure programs such as E-Rate,
enrichment efforts like the Supplemental Educational Services, and expanded
community after-school programs, most low-income and minority children
have no or little access to the best technology-assisted learning available today.
Beyond access, they also lack appropriate guidance and attention from grown-
ups on how best to use and leverage the technology.
Building on important models developed by corporations such as Intel (Com-
puter Clubhouses), national informal
education leaders such as the Boys and It is time to create a place
Girls Clubs (Club Tech), and the feder-
ally supported Community Learning
in every community where
Centers, it is time to create a place in young children can gain
every community where young chil-
confidence in their literacy
dren can gain confidence in their lit-
eracy and interactive technology skills. and technology skills.
These centers, funded with what Andy
Rotherham (in Democracy’s spring 2008 issue) has described as “after school
coupons,” should expose children to high-quality, engaging digital worlds and
tools that integrate language and literacy development with deep content learn-
ing. The knowledge tools would include simulations, games, and media produc-
tion capabilities delivered on mobile and handheld devices. And these centers
should be staffed in part by knowledgeable members of a Digital Teachers Corps
who can help children make the most of technology.
In addition, over the past two decades, governors, philanthropies, and busi-
ness leaders have created choice or magnet schools on key themes ranging from
science and math, to arts and culture, to international education, with some
notable successes. Secondary school models such as High Tech and New Tech
High Schools offer helpful lessons on new school creation and how to teach
essential skills in a digital age.
These schools, funded with innovation dollars provided by a newly struc-
tured NCLB, would be laboratories for testing different digital approaches to
learning and assessment, as well as for breaking down the barriers between
in- and out-of-school learning. They could become a hub for the professional
development of digitally savvy teachers. The model schools could also link to

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state innovations such as virtual high schools to deliver strong instruction in

key areas that most children have no access to, such as high-quality second-
language instruction, which is associated with higher levels of performance on
native language skills in the early grades. Finally, these schools could become
a fulcrum for demonstrating how businesses could get involved by donating
mentors, training teachers, or funding model initiatives.

Modernize and Recommit to Public Media

Educational television media for young children, stimulated by the pioneering
“Sesame Street,” have accumulated a four-decade track record indicating that
under the right conditions, basic reading, math, and social skills can be enhanced
for young children, especially those from underserved communities. It is past
time for these television-based efforts, largely paid for with taxpayer dollars,
to be modernized to advance a public trust to meet the needs of low-income
children and families.
A first step would be a radically redesigned “Ready-to-Learn” program
financed by Congress and the U.S. Department of Education, which now reaches
millions of low-income children with quality television broadcast fare but which
has paid little attention to extending learning on new platforms, or widening
low-cost, linguistically diverse distribution in schools and community settings.
Successful shows like “Blues Clues,” “Ghost Writer,” and “The Electric Company”
demonstrate that television can teach skills in ways that encourage adults to be
involved with children’s learning as an interactive experience between parent
and child. The digital media and games spawned by such shows have been used
informally to accelerate children’s cognitive growth, language development, and
affiliation with school learning. Digital media may provide opportunities for the
more intensive exposure needed to accelerate struggling students’ performance
that these television programs have not delivered in the past.
To that end, a modernized Corporation for Public Media should follow a
framework for production that includes wider experimentation with new for-
mats such as games, virtual worlds, mobile learning, and social network com-
munities to engage children on both traditional and newer literacy skills. Any
new taxpayer commitment should promote the development of different busi-
ness models and incentives to ensure that intellectual property is more open,
available for modification by children and teachers, and widely distributed to
schools and other learning centers.
Five decades ago, the threat to our nation’s security posed by the Soviet launch
of Sputnik galvanized an education reform movement that invested wisely in
basic research, higher education, and area studies. As a result, the United States

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catapulted to dominant leadership in math, science, and technology. Today, the

threat is to America’s economy, and it comes from the inexorable but less vis-
ible currents of globalization and substantial self-imposed hemorrhages in our
financial systems. American leadership in the new economy can be assured only
if students are prepared to read for effective content learning and if we promote
the types of knowledge, creativity, communications, and innovation skills young
people will need to compete and cooperate in a global age. Leveraging the power
and potential of digital media for literacy learning, starting now, can play a piv-
otal role in ensuring a bright future for all of our children. d

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