EDC|CCT served as the research partner for this five-year period of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting–PBS Ready To Learn Initiative (CPB-PBS RTL). As CPB–PBS worked to design new multimedia learning resources for young children—especially those from low-income families—we led a coalition of highly regarded research partners from SRI Education, Rockman et al., and UCLA-CRESST in conducting formative research to answer the following questions. 

• What design principles should guide the creation of the CPB-PBS RTL resources to ensure they address target learning goals? How can producers enact these principles to take advantage of the unique affordances of each platform, including the new Learning Analytics platform and its emphasis on adaptivity, while also considering how each platform is part of a larger model that seeks to promote family engagement and learning?

• How well are the instructional design principles embodied in the resources meeting their intended purpose (e.g., appeal, engagement, learning)? Are the resources effectively promoting the intended learning goals?

• How can resources be improved and optimized to meet their intended purpose and to better address the target learning goals?

• What lessons learned could inform future research and development and the field more broadly?

The research team began this cycle of collaborative, iterative formative research studies with a robust domain analysis to detail the target science and literacy learning content.

For more information, see https://cct.edc.org/rtl