On‐screen print: the role of captions as a supplemental literacy tool

Children living in poverty are 1.3 times as likely as non‐poor children to experience reading difficulties and lack key oral experiences that contribute to early literacy development. The purpose of this research was to study the effects of viewing commercially available educational television with closed captions. Seventy second‐ and third‐grade economically disadvantaged children living in urban locations participated in this experimental research design. Children were randomly assigned to view videos with or without closed captions. Captions helped children recognise and read more words, identify the meaning of those words, generate inferences regarding programme content and transfer these skills to a normative code‐related skill task. Risk status moderated word recognition performance: those at risk benefited from captions while those who were not at risk recognised more words when captions were absent.     

Data assemblages,sentient schools and digitised health and physical education (response to Gard)

Michael Gard raises some important issues in his opinion piece on digitised health and physical education (HPE) in the school setting. His piece represents the beginning of a more critical approach to the instrumental and solutionist perspectives that are currently offered on digitised HPE. Few commentators in education, health promotion or sports studies have begun to realise the extent to which digital data surveillance and analytics are now encroaching into many social institutions and settings and the ways in which actors and agencies in the digital knowledge economy are appropriating these data. Identifying what is happening and the implications for the concepts of selfhood, body and social relations, not to mention the more specific issues of privacy and the commercialisation and exploitation of personal data, requires much greater attention than these issues have previously received in the critical social research literature. While Gard has begun to do this in his article, there is much more to discuss. In this response, I present some discussion that seeks to provide a complementary commentary on the broader context in which digitised HPE is developing and manifesting. Whether or not one takes a position that is techno-utopian, dystopian or somewhere in between, I would argue that to fully understand the social, cultural and political resonances of digitised HPE, such contextualising is vital.