Developing media production skills for literacy in a primary school classroom: Digital materials, embodied knowledge and material contexts

This chapter investigates the relationship between technical and operational skills and the development of conceptual knowledge and literacy in Media Arts learning. It argues that there is a relationship between the stories, expressions and ideas that students aim to produce with communications media, and their ability to realise these in material form through technical processes in specific material contexts. Our claim is that there is a relationship between the technical and the operational, along with material relations and the development of conceptual knowledge and literacy in media arts learning. We place more emphasis on the material aspects of literacy than is usually the case in socio-cultural accounts of media literacy. We provide examples from a current project to demonstrate that it is just as important to address the material as it is the discursive and conceptual when considering how students develop media literacy in classroom spaces

Electronic gaming: Associations with self-regulation, emotional difficulties and academic performance

Drawing on data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC), this chapter reports on the use of electronic games by young children (8-9 years old) and the associations with cognitive self-regulation, academic performance (mathematics, language and literacy) and emotional difficulties two years later when children were 10-11 years of age. Results indicated that, compared to children who played electronic games for 120 minutes or less per week, playing games for between 121 and 240 minutes per week was associated with better scores on Language and Literacy and Mathematical Thinking at 10 to 11 years of age. Conversely, use of electronic games for more than an hour per day (more than 421 minutes per week) was associated with lower cognitive self-regulation and an increase in emotional difficulties at 10-11 years of age