Roberta Golinkoff

Unidel H. Rodney Sharp Chair and Professor University of Delaware

Newark DE

Prof. Golinkoff studies language development, playful learning, effects of media on children, spatial development, and applying her science.

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Spotlight

Mar 5, 2025

1 min

Empowering young minds: Digital platform providing educational resources for children impacted by Russo-Ukrainian War

Digital platforms have emerged as powerful tools for people impacted by the Russo-Ukrainian War. One professor at the University of Delaware has, for over two years, provided reading resources specifically for the children whose lives have been forever changed by this conflict. Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, the Unidel H. Rodney Sharp Chair and Professor at UD's College of Education and Human Development, has developed a website with free interactive e-books, games and other resources to Ukrainian children. A nationally known expert in childhood literacy, Golinkoff worked together with developers to stock the site, Stories with Clever Hedgehog, with materials in both Ukrainian and English. The multilingual platforms allows displaced families all over the world to engage in shared reading with their children, facilitate early literacy development and promote well-being during a time of stress. In addition to enhancing learning experiences, digital platforms provide an essential sense of community and connectivity for students isolated by conflict. Golinkoff, who has appeared in numerous national outlets including NPR, ABC News and The Conversation, is available for interviews on the site as well as literacy in general. Just click her profile to get in touch.

Sep 18, 2024

1 min

The role of digital media in children's literacy

From tablets and smartphones to computers and smart TVs, kids have more access to digital content than ever before. But what does this mean for their literacy skills? One University of Delaware professor is embracing the use of digital media to improve children's literacy. Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, chair and professor in the School of Education UD, created Stories with Clever Hedgehog last year to offer books to children, specifically those who have been displaced or impacted by the Russo-Ukrainian War. This website allows families all over the world to engage in shared reading with their children, facilitate early literacy development and promote children’s well-being. Much research in early childhood education has underscored the importance of reading early and often with children, beginning during a child’s infancy and continuing throughout the elementary years. Reading during this critical point in children’s development fosters language acquisition, early literacy skills, socioemotional growth and comprehension of the world around them. Golinkoff's research partners and many others have demonstrated that shared book reading — when a child reads with a caregiver — encourages children to ask questions and draw connections to their own experiences, promotes story comprehension, increases children’s vocabulary and provides opportunities for emotional bonding. She is available to discuss even more benefits of reading, especially in this digital format. To connect, click her profile. She has been featured

Aug 5, 2024

3 min

Those last days of summer: How to entertain your kids before the break ends

Are you one of the parents who is panicked at the prospect of entertaining your children for those final weeks of the summer? Did you miss the day camp sign ups early in the summer? University of Delaware expert Roberta Golinkoff has you covered. Golinkoff is an education professor in the fields of education and psychology with over 30 years of experience in childhood education. She is currently Unidel H. Rodney Sharp Chair and Professor in UD's School of Education as well as a member of the Departments of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Linguistics and Cognitive Science. She also directs the Child’s Play, Learning, and Development laboratory. She gives tips on how to keep kids entertained throughout the summer, particularly this last month of summer. Work with others in your neighborhood in the same boat to create an at home day camp. What happens at day camps can be duplicated at home. Consider how they work. Peers get together under the supervision of a young adult and engage in outdoor activities such as foot races and ball games and indoor activities such as arts and crafts. Camps are hotbeds for playful learning – the way that children learn best. Camps unwittingly nurture communication between peers and adults, collaboration in helping your team, and creative thinking of all types – during craft activities but much more. Making a tentative agenda for kids with other parents in the same boat will be invaluable. But there is no room for a rigid schedule! Time has to be flexible. During the regular year when parents are rushing hither and yon, there is little time to stop and let the action continue. But the summer changes all that. Discoveries like hungry turtles in a nearby pond can be a delight for children. Even if you can’t find a teen helper or another parent to trade off with, you can engage your children in many activities they will love. Limited screen time can be beneficial. There is nothing wrong with playing with apps or watching television as long as parents make sure the content is appropriate for the age of their children. There are shows that amuse children and that they can learn from – Sesame Street and Reading Rainbow are prime examples. And parents can build on these shows by asking children to design the next episode, “What would happen if Peppa Pig couldn’t find a playmate?” or draw pictures showing the characters at the beach! A new website called Stories with Clever Hedgehog and designed in Ukrainian for Ukrainian children suffering from the war is also available in English. Designed by developmental psychologists – including Golinkoff herself – has numerous activities such as games, songs, art, fun facts for children to enjoy. But media that takes place indoors should just be used as cool down periods and even then only briefly, or on rainy days. Luxurious breezes, sunshine, and physical activities are what summer is meant for. Boredom is ok. Boredom is not a bad thing and can be a time for reflection and inner growth. Ask children to think about what they want to do next and make a plan for the rest of the day. Ask children to come up with a brand new activity that other kids would like. Media is not a great solution to boredom anyway but developing strategies to consider boredom a plus can be. Golinkoff is available to give more tips. She also welcomes reporters to visit her lab to see what she and her group are working on. Contact her by clicking on her profile.

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Biography

Dr. Roberta Michnick Golinkoff is the Unidel H. Rodney Sharp Chair and professor in the School of Education at the University of Delaware. She also holds joint appointments in the Departments of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Linguistics and Cognitive Science. Dr. Golinkoff is also founder and director of the Child’s Play, Learning, and Development Lab.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences, the National Institutes of Health, and the LEGO Foundation, Dr. Golinkoff’s research on language development, the benefits of play, effects of media, and preschoolers’ early spatial knowledge has resulted in numerous articles, book chapters and books. Passionate about the dissemination of psychological science, she also writes books for parents and practitioners. Examples include How Babies Talk (1999), the award-winning Einstein Never Used Flash Cards (2004), and A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool (2009). Her penultimate book, Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children, reached the New York Times best seller list in 2016. Her newest book is Making Schools Work.

Dr. Golinkoff also co-founded the Ultimate Block Party movement to celebrate the science of learning as well as Playful Learning Landscapes to transform cities into playful learning centers for children to prepare them for success in a global world. These installations marry the science of learning with architectural design and make learning science come alive.

In 2023, she created a website for Ukrainian children and families called, Stories with Clever Hedgehog, to help children retain some normalcy in their lives and learn in a playful way. That website is also in English and ideal for any child between 0-10 who speaks English.

Dr. Golinkoff has received numerous honors and awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Service Award, and the Urie Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology in the Service of Science and Society. Most recently, she was awarded the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) Outstanding Public Communication of Education Research Award in 2018 and named an AERA Fellow in 2019 movement to celebrate the science of learning.

Areas of Expertise

Early Childhood Education

Early Spatial Development

Playful Learning

Benefits of Play

Effects of Media on Children

Language Development

Child Development

Media Appearances

University of Delaware professor creates website addressing Ukrainian childhood literacy

Delaware Public Media radio

2023-09-29

To help dispersed Ukrainian families and their children’s development, UD’s Roberta Golinkoff, Chair of UD’s College of Education and Human Development, has partnered with Sesame Workshop and others to develop “Stories with Clever Hedgehog,” a website with free, interactive e-books, games, and various resources.

What is ‘sad beige,’ and why do some parents love it so much?

Yahoo! News online

2023-01-18

Dr. Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, a psychologist and professor at the University of Delaware, tells TODAY.com that she doesn't understand the trend, but thinks it seems harmless.

"This is not a trend that I can endorse, but it’s not a trend that would be harmful to children," she says.

Winning the 'reading wars' is just the first step

Yahoo! News online

2023-02-25

“The reading wars, it turns out, created a false dichotomy between meaning versus phonics as primary drivers of beginning — and later proficient — reading. The scientific answer is more nuanced. It takes both phonics and meaning to create strong readers. … Meaning making is the key to finding richness in the narratives and the motivation for wanting to read.” — Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Brookings

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Articles

International Journal of Educational Development

International Journal of Educational Development

2023

Korean society values skills such as creativity and confidence, but the current education system fails to support children in developing these skills. We present a model of Playful Learning that leverages "how" children learn to support not just content but other skills needed for 21st century success. We contextualize the innovative model of "what" and "how" of learning within longstanding Korean value systems and discuss the successful adaptation of Playful Learning. By addressing pervasive misunderstandings about play, providing safe spaces for play, and allocating time for play, Korea can emerge as a leading paragon of the International Playful Learning Movement.

Sensitivity to visual cues within motion events in monolingual and bilingual infants

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

2023

It is well known that infants undergo developmental change in how they respond to language-relevant visual contrasts. For example, when viewing motion events, infants’ sensitivities to background information (“ground-path cues,” e.g., whether a background is flat and continuous or bounded) change with age. Prior studies with English and Japanese monolingual infants have demonstrated that 14-month-old infants discriminate between motion events that take place against different ground-paths (e.g., an unbounded field vs a bounded street). By 19 months of age, this sensitivity becomes more selective in monolingual infants; only learners of languages that lexically contrast these categories, such as Japanese, discriminate between such events. In this study, we investigated this progression in bilingual infants. We first replicated past reports of an age-related decline in ground-path sensitivity from 14 to 19 months in English monolingual infants living in a multilingual society. English–Mandarin bilingual infants living in that same society were then tested on discrimination of ground-path cues at 14, 19, and 24 months. Although neither the English nor Mandarin language differentiates motion events based on ground-path cues, bilingual infants demonstrated protracted sensitivity to these cues. Infants exhibited a lack of discrimination at 14 months, followed by discrimination at 19 months and a subsequent decline in discrimination at 24 months. In addition, bilingual infants demonstrated more fine-grained sensitivities to subtle ground cues not observed in monolingual infants.

From green to turquoise: Exploring age and socioeconomic status in the acquisition of color terms

First Language

2023

Previous research demonstrates that children delineate more nuanced color boundaries with increased exposure to their native language. As socioeconomic status (SES) is known to correlate with differences in the amount of language input children receive, this study attempts to extend previous research by asking how both age (age 3 vs 5) and SES (under-resourced vs advantaged) might impact color name acquisition of preschool children. The results confirm the findings of previous research, showing that older children labeled the color continuum more accurately than did younger participants. In addition, we found that while SES did not make a difference in how children labeled the continuum using basic color terms (e.g. blue), basic color terms with achromatic modifiers (e.g. light blue), and compound terms (e.g. blueish-green), 5-year-olds from more advantaged economic environments used significantly more non-basic color terms (e.g. turquoise) compared to their counterparts from under-resourced environments. We suggest that, as children hear more non-basic terms, these world-to-word mappings become solidified, and exposure to such labels may contribute to the timing of when children can map those terms to the color continuum.

Accomplishments

AERA Fellow

2019

Outstanding Public Communication of Education Research Award, American Association of Educational Research (AERA)

2018

Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Child Development Award, Society for Research in Child Development

2017

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Education

Cornell University,

PhD

Developmental Psychology

1973

University of Pittsburgh

Postdoctoral Fellowship

Learning Research and Development Center

1971

Brooklyn College

Psychology

1968

Affiliations

University of Stavanger in Norway : Adjunct Professor
National Academy of Education : Member

Languages

English