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