screen research: studying how children learn from media georgene troseth department of psychology...
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Screen Research:Studying How Children Learn from Media
Georgene TrosethDepartment of Psychology & Human Development
Peabody College, Vanderbilt
DeLoache, Chiong, Sherman, Islam, Vanderborght, Troseth, Strouse, & O’Doherty (2010, Psych. Science)
• 12- to 18-month-olds
• Parents given a DVD or vocabulary words written on a piece of paper
• 1 month exposure, 5 times per week
• Control group: no added activities
Einsteins Everywhere?
Results
• Children who viewed the DVD did not learn any more words than the control group did
• Highest level of learning occurred in the no-video parent-teaching condition
• Parents who liked the DVD overestimated how much their children learned from it
The “Video Deficit” in Toddler Learning
• Toddlers learn better from a person who is there/ a real event vs. one on a screen– Imitating a novel
behavior– Learning a word
What’s Hard About Learning from Video?
• Symbolic thinking: Realizing that an image on a screen stands for reality
• Realizing that a person on a screen is offering relevant information
Studying Toddlers
• Short attention span• Impulsive • Limited language• Immature motor development• Changeable emotions
Search Task• Simple problem solving “game”
• Find a toy hidden in a room
• Child does not see hiding event directly
• Information on where to find the object comes
from a symbolic medium (video screen)
• To solve the problem, child needs to apply info from the symbol (video) to a real situation
Find the Hidden Toy
Participants: 2- and 2-1/2-year-olds
Troseth & DeLoache (1998, Child Development)
Live Video Real Window
Let the Younger Kids Watch Themselves on Live Video
Troseth (2003, Developmental Psychology)
Finding game: “I hid Piglet under the blanket.”
Telling on TV Telling in person
27% correct 77% correct
Learning from a Person on a ScreenTroseth, Saylor, & Archer (2006, Child Development)
Video chat: Person on TV interacted with the child & parent for 5 minutes
69% correct on finding game
Then she revealed the toy’s location
Todders & Video: Summary
• Children do not expect TV to connect to reality
– Experience with video related to reality helped them to use information from video
• Social cues missing from video impair learning for very young viewers
– Providing those cues on video (e.g., contingent responsiveness) helped them learn
Preschool
• Substantial evidence that children age 3 to 5 learn and get long-term benefits from watching Sesame Street
(e.g., Anderson, Huston, Wright, et al., 2001)
Parent Co-viewing • 3-year-olds
• 4-week study
• Children watch storybooks on video
• Pre- & post-test of vocabulary (story & general)
• Post-test story comprehension
Strouse, O’Doherty, & Troseth (2013, Developmental Psychology)
4 Conditions – Regular Video: Parents showed the videos to their children as normal
– Dialogic Questioning: Parents trained to pause the videos/ ask questions
– Directed attention: Parents labeled & described rather than questioning
– Dialogic Actress: Person on screen paused & asked questions (easier ones first, more difficult later)
Dialogic question prompts (simple to harder)• Completion – Fill in the blank. e.g., “I’ll huff,
I’ll puff, I’ll ____”
• Recall – Remember something that happened in the story
• Open-ended – Short answer. e.g., “What do you think he’ll do next?”
• Wh questions – Start with Who, Where, When, Why, or What
• Distancing – Relating story contents to the child’s life -- e.g., “Do you remember when we saw the elephant at the zoo?”
ResultsCompared to “Watch as usual” group, Dialogic group improved in:
• Standardized Expressive Vocabulary (EOW-PVT)
• Story-Specific Vocabulary
• Story Comprehension
• Dialogic Actress group learned almost as much about story (including story vocab)
• Directed Attention group scored in the middle (learned somewhat better than watching alone)
http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2011/12/vucast-educational-video-research/
Current research
• E-books (kinds of hot spots/ interactivity)
• Tablets– Tapping and self-
regulation– Kind of interaction and
learning