Beyond such practices, Kevin Crowley, an expert on out-of-school learning, has studied how young children develop "islands of expertise," which he defines as "any topic in which children happen to become interested in." One example is a boy who develops a "sophisticated conversational space" about trains and related topics after he is given a Thomas the Tank Engine book and is supported in his interests by a tuned-in, guiding adult.

Many students today, especially from low-income families, do not get these sorts of early language-based preparation for schooling. Although billions of dollars have been spent developing and administering reading intervention programs for four-to-nine year olds under No Child Left Behind and Title I, these policies have made scant progress and have failed to fundamentally improve reading skills, especially the skills that lead to mastering school-based content.

Closing Two Gaps at Once

If we do not get the transition from early schooling to later schooling right so that all young people have a solid foundation for learning language and content, we will face two educational gaps–an old reading gap and a new digital gap–both detrimental to our success as a leading nation.

These two gaps intersect. The old reading gap can only worsen as the high-tech world makes larger and more complex demands on literacy and content learning. At the same time, the old reading gap prevents certain children from meeting these demands. What exactly is the connection between digital media on the one hand, and literacy, content learning, and complex academic language on the other?

Put simply, digital media–video games, simulations, modeling tools, handheld devices, and media production tools–can allow students to do two fundamentally important things. First, they can see how complex language and other symbol systems attach to the world. We can put kids into virtual worlds and let them engage in goal-based interactions with others. Consider the video game Dimenxian from Tabula Digita, in which children use an algebraic Cartesian coordinate system to allow their avatar to navigate the landscape and eventually construct coordinate systems to map their environment and solve algebraic problems in the virtual world. They have to "algebratize" the world to play the game, and the game world gives them constant feedback and mentoring. They now have vivid images and actions associated with algebraic symbols that give them "situated meanings"–that is, meanings tied to experiences they can remember when they need to use coordinate systems for further problem-solving.

Second, young people can use digital media to produce knowledge and to display, argue for, and demonstrate their learning. This can transform our traditional notions of assessment towards more genuine mastery of skill sets. Digital media can also combine assessment more intimately with teaching. When media tools are used to track what learners do moment by moment, we can study different trajectories toward mastery, give students constant feedback based on this knowledge, and assess progress across time and not just in terms of a one-off test.

Of course, in the best schools, kids have always learned not just out of books, but also through technologically advanced media, greatly expanding the possibilities available. In the past it was projectors and stand-alone computers; today, young people still read books and textbooks, but through networked technologies and interactive digital media, they can also interact directly with worlds previously described passively, and act with others to learn and produce knowledge.

During the past decade we have made giant leaps in children’s and educators’ access to digital technologies. Data from national studies conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation indicate that families across income and demographic categories now have access to the Internet, cell phones, and video game platforms and that the amount of time spent on digital media for children out of school has accelerated dramatically.

Formal education systems play an equalizing role in educational opportunity. School connectivity to the Internet, for example, has grown enormously in the past decade, due to policy and financing efforts such as E-Rate, which spent approximately $16 billion to wire schools and libraries between 1998 and 2008. Teens across income groups reported use of the Internet in school growing by 45 percent between 2000 and 2006. But policy failures such as a lack of effective technology integration into classrooms, and adult concern about media distractions, has increasingly fragmented what children do at home and in the school environment, often to the detriment of low-income kids. In other words, it’s not enough to be digitally connected–schools, and their students, need to know how to use those connections.

Three Policy Challenges

We must address three major policy challenges to prepare our children to enter the globalized, automated, increasingly complex world. First, early reading instruction will yield insufficient benefits if it does not prepare children for later content learning. Our current approach is failing too many students who experience the avoidable fourth-grade reading slump. In addressing this fateful indicator, three fundamental issues quickly arise: How do we ensure that all children, not just those from highly educated homes, get good early preparation, not just for reading but for academic language as well? What do we do for young people who have gotten past the early years of schooling, but are now on a tragic path to academic failure? And, with the enormous growth in the number of English language learners, how do we teach rigorously in the larger context of multilingual language development?

Using new digital media for learning, supported by well-trained and committed adult guidance and instruction, can address all these questions at once. Such media allow learners–young and old, behind or ahead in school, first- or second-language speakers of English–to visualize and experience the meanings of words, rather than just associate words with others that may not be understood in context. This can lead to better preparation for future learning, as well as deeper learning that enhances problem-solving–and not just passing paper-and-pencil tests.

Second, addressing America’s science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) crisis must always include language learning embedded in digital knowledge and skills beginning in the early grades. Many people think that learning science has nothing to do with language or literacy and everything to do with concepts and facts. However, these subjects are accessible only through the language and other symbol systems they use to represent their concepts, content, and practices. And science is not unique–this dependence on language is true of all academic domains and, indeed, most professional domains. Furthermore, different academic domains develop different forms of language and use different sorts of symbols. By the time a student is in high school or college–not to mention a high-tech workplace–the ability to handle complex forms of language and other symbol systems is crucial. It is an entry ticket into the forms of thinking, problem-solving, and knowledge production that are the essences of higher-order skills today.

Third, new digital tools can transform learning and innovation if they are wisely and equitably deployed. Simple access to digital media for learning will not narrow achievement gaps. What is crucial is access to support and structured mentorship as well. In a recent study of high-end computers and reputable learning software placed into libraries in economically diverse communities, it was found that well-off parents accompanied their children to the library and mentored them to read at or above their reading levels, to sustain their engagement with particular learning activities, and to do so in strategic ways. Poorer families engaged much less in such mentoring, which means their children will likely gain less school-based knowledge from digital media and print literacy, read less well, be more passive in their activities, have less of a foundation to build on, and thus fall further behind. In contrast, the more-well-off students progressively build on their achievements. In this way, digital media–much like print literacy–can make "the rich richer and the poor poorer."

These findings do not mean that parents are the only effective source of mentoring. Good digital media made for learning build into themselves important mentoring devices such as well-ordered problems and artificial (virtual) or real tutors. However, they can only be useful if parents, teachers, and more advanced peers help children seek out good learning media and fruitfully draw on their internal design features for learning.

The crucial issue is how to address new digital literacies–that is, expertise with digital media as a form of communication and knowledge production–without forgetting traditional literacy. America’s goal must be to close both the reading gap and the digital gap at the same time and in ways that create learners who are able to innovate and produce knowledge, not just recapitulate standard answers on tests.

Digital media hold out the potential to enhance the new skills necessary for success in a global age. They can integrate oral and written language and real-world interactions as well as provide an enormous source of images, actions, and dialogue, all of which help users learn to situate meanings in a great variety of domains, including school subjects such as algebra, science, social studies, art, and literature. They can help level the playing field for learners whose families have not introduced them to a wealth of experiences connected to these domains. In today’s marketplace, being tech-savvy, literate, and constantly learning new content is the equation for learning to innovate.