ABOUT

About LearningWorks for Kids

What We Do
The premise of LearningWorks for Kids is that digital technologies can be an effective tool in teaching critical thinking and self-regulatory skills. This comes from years of observing children with a range of learning, attention, and social/emotional difficulties combined with an awareness of recent innovations in neuroscience, the role of play in children’s learning, the development of game-based learning strategies, and increasing needs for highly stimulating and exciting learning opportunities for children. In a world in which new and engaging technologies are being developed on a daily basis, we see an increasingly important need to learn to use these tools not only as opportunities for gaming or to support learning, but also to enhance a child’s capacity to think, evaluate, judge, and make good decisions. 

The founder of LearningWorks for Kids, I. Randy Kulman, Ph.D., a child clinical psychologist for more than 20 years, has observed thousands of children who experience executive dysfunctions.  These include difficulties with organization, planning, time management, problem solving, and regulating their behaviors and emotions. These youngsters often display difficulties such as distractibility, getting started on tasks, and sustaining their attention and effort on schoolwork or other activities. However, the vast majority of them enjoy, and often become immersed in, their involvement with computers, video games, and other digital technologies. 

LearningWorks for Kids uses children’s captivation--or as we call it, engamement—with digital technologies to teach executive functions. We provide step by step instructions on how to use digital technologies to practice, rehearse and support executive functions. Our most important contribution is demonstrating how to apply executive function skills used in game play to the child’s real world. Simply playing a game does not adequately produce competent executive skills for the real world.  A connection must be made in order to generalize and apply the skills used to real world situations.

For the most part, LearningWorks for Kids is about catching the kids where they are. The majority of our coaching guides and recommendations for parents/teachers are about popular games and technologies that children use on a daily basis. For example, we purposely selected many of the most popular nonviolent video games for our coaching guides and manuals. Identifying commonly used digital technologies such as the Internet, cell phones, and digital cameras as resources for the development of executive function skills is also based upon children’s regular use of these technologies. 

With the goal of teaching children executive functions and helping them to apply them in their real-world environments at the forefront of LearningWorks for Kids, we are also actively involved in searching out new toys, tools, and technologies that may be useful in enhancing critical thinking and self-regulatory skills. We welcome input from kids, parents, and teachers about the tools that they find to be most useful. And we are interested in anything from the newest toy or gadget to low tech strategies such as using puzzles, mazes, and board games to teach these skills.

How Do We Do It?

The LearningWorks for Kids model is based upon research gleaned from many disciplines, including psychology, education, neuroscience, computer science, and games research. Our principles are based in part on the work of the following: Futurelabs; The Federation of American Scientists; James Paul Gee, Ph.D.; Peg Dawson, Ed.D. and Richard Guare, Ph.D.; Henry Jenkins, Ph.D.; Torkel Klingberg, Ph.D.; Elkhonon Goldberg, Ph.D.; Anthony Betrus, Ph.D.; Lynn Meltzer, Ph.D.; Gary Stoner, Ph.D.; George DuPaul, Ph.D.; and Children’s Technology Review. The work of these individuals and organizations supports our strategies for using popular digital technologies and games to develop executive function skills in children

Towards this goal, we do the following:

Identify digital toys, games, technologies, and other tools that develop, rehearse, and support the use of executive function skills. 

Use principles of education and psychology to enhance effective teaching.  These principles include: 

• Making the learning goals explicit
• Developing a partnership with the child for learning executive skills
• Practicing skills in an interesting and reinforcing manner
• Previewing strategies to help children recognize how they will be using executive functioning skills in their game play and digital technology use
• Employing generalization and point of performance strategies that link executive functions used with digital technologies to real-world experiences
• Utilizing software and games that customize the learning experience
• Using peer tutors in the classroom to enhance learning from games

Take advantage of the compelling nature of digital technologies and games that result in the child’s interest in learning.  We call the child’s absorption with digital technologies “engamement.” 

Features of digital technologies leading to engamement include:

• The chance to learn by doing and through guided discovery
• The increasing levels of challenge that match the child’s mastery
• The multimodal nature of digital technologies using words, actions, and sounds
• The ability to customize learning experiences
• The opportunity to develop content
• The encouragement of inquiry, for example, searching on the Internet
• The clarity  and speed of immediate feedback
• The trial and error methods where making mistakes is an accepted part of the process, just as hypothesis-testing and rethinking are an expected component
• The lack of criticism by peers or authority figures
• The activities involving previewing and repeated practice that prove more stimulating and interesting by nature than many of their classroom counterparts.

Demonstrate to parents, teachers, peers, and the children themselves how to identify their use of executive skills while involved with digital technologies and other tools. Our goal is to help children use metacognitive, reflective and self-observational strategies to become aware of their applications of executive function skills while playing games and in the real world. We do this with:

1.  Game and digital technology guides that identify how and where executive functions are employed in play or use.

2.  “Talking points” for parents/teachers to help children reflect on their use of executive functions in other games and real-world situations.

3.  Debriefing and coaching strategies that encourage the use of questions about how executive functions are used both in and out of games.

Assist children, parents, and teachers in understanding the importance of executive skills in goal setting, problem solving, and effective adaptation to home, school, and social environments.  We do this with our entertaining and educational guides, describing for parents and children how executive functions are used in the child’s world.

Provide kids, parents, and teachers methods to translate and generalize their game-playing skills to the real world by identifying real-world opportunities to practice these skills.  Our real-world guides help parents to identify where executive function skills are used in common daily experiences, increase a child’s effective use of these skills and provide behavioral and reward strategies for them. Follow-up strategies to increase generalization include:

Kid directed plans, in which children are given a choice of digital technologies to use to support and reinforce the development of a similar executive function skill set. The parent/teacher/tutor does not provide any direction other than to make the digital technology accessible to the child. The child is encouraged to choose and play the game on his/her own and to discuss his/her use of executive function skills in using the digital technology with his/her coach. The child is given an opportunity to play the game freely (within time limits or screen time imposed by his/her family). The only requirement is that he/she is to identify his/her use of executive skills in the game. Preferably, he/she will use the LearningWorks for Kids Executive Function Identification Handout and then later show these game portions to his/her family.

Parent directed plans, in which parents choose another digital technology or game in which a LearningWorks for Kids coaching guide is available to provide you with talking points and strategies for generalization to the real world. Alternatively, select a digital technology from the LearningWorks for Kids list or one that the parent/teacher is familiar with that requires the use of a similar set of executive function skills.

Encourage the growth and development of new neural pathways through the practice effects of digital technologies and other neurotechnologies such as working memory training programs. Recent studies, which demonstrate the plasticity of the human brain, indicate that the use of training with digital technologies can enhance working memory skills and a wide range of other executive functions, with corresponding changes in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. Many cognitive innovations, such as Cogmed Working memory  Training, Cogfit, Happy Neuron and Brain Builders have begun to offer activities  for kids and adults to “train the brain”.