This article was written by Eleanor Thornton, a student from Wilmslow High School in Manchester, who did a one week work placement in Psychology Department at the University of Salford (including some work for the Salford Cognitive Development Lab) in July 2022. Eleanor is interested in how hearing loss can impact on children’s mental health. […]
Our ESRC research project “Investigating the educational potential of touchscreen apps for children’s early vocabulary acquisition” is (sadly) coming to an end. To mark this milestone, we have recorded the final episode of our Child Development Podcast in which Dr Gemma Taylor (who runs our lab) and Dr Joanna Kolak (who has been working as […]
We’re pleased to let you know that the new episode of our podcast is out! In this episode, Dr Joanna Kolak from our lab talks to Dr Francesca La Morgia – lecturer, researcher, consultant and trainer, the founding director of Mother Tongues, a non for profit organisation that promotes multilingualism in Ireland. Her main interests are […]
We hope you have missed our podcasts because we’re pleased to announce that we’re back after a short (or not so short, but it’s been a very busy semester!) break. In today’s episode of our podcast, Dr Joanna Kolak from our lab talks to Professor Mila Dimitrova Vulchanova from the Department of Language and Literature […]
Nowadays young children spend a lot of time on smartphones and tablets, even before they start formal schooling. Researchers from the University of Massachusetts were wondering whether the time spent with digital media at home could help in fostering young children’s school readiness. In the latest research published in the Journal of Children and Media […]
We are pleased to announce that the first paper from our ESRC grant “Investigating the educational potential of touchscreen apps for children’s early vocabulary acquisition” has been published today in the Journal of Children and Media! In the paper titled “Developing evaluation tools for assessing the educational potential of apps for preschool children in the […]
There are many factors that influence children’s learning from digital media. One of them is the context of learning. Children are often involved in a passive video viewing context. This means that they don’t have the influence over the order in which the new information is presented to them, and they are not asked to […]
Last Thursday, on 12th November, Dr Gemma Taylor and Joanna Kolak from our lab ran an online webinar for parents and early years professionals entitled “What makes children’s apps educational?” During the webinar we discussed app features and app design while showing participants videos including examples of activities from the most popular apps for preschool […]
We’re pleased to present a new episode of our podcast in which Joanna Kolak talks to Dr Marina Bazhydai, lecturer in Psychology at Lancaster University. Marina is a developmental scientist interested in infant curiosity and its effect on successful learning outcomes, developmental precursors to creativity, active information seeking and information giving in early childhood. Marina […]
In today’s episode of our lab’s podcast Joanna Kolak talks to Dr Priya Silverstein, Postdoctoral Researcher in the CoGDev Lab at the University of Surrey. Priya is currently studying the relationship between Lego construction ability, spatial thinking and numeracy achievement and she was telling us about the studies she’s running. Priya was also explaining why […]