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This is a copy of the authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscript as accepted for publication in Developmental Psychology.
Strouse, G. A., O’Doherty, K., & Troseth, G. L. (2013). Effective coviewing: Preschoolers’ learning from video after a dialogic questioning intervention. Developmental Psychology, 49, 2368. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0032463
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/dev/49/12/2368/
'This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.'
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Effective Co-Viewing: Preschoolers’ Learning from Video After a Dialogic Questioning Intervention Gabrielle A. Strouse, Katherine D. O’Doherty, and Georgene L. Troseth Vanderbilt University
Author Note Gabrielle A. Strouse, Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University. Katherine D. O’Doherty and Georgene L. Troseth are also at the Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University. This research was supported by a graduate traineeship from the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through grant R305B040110 to Vanderbilt University, and a Bonsal Education Research Entrepreneurship Award from Peabody College. Additional resources were provided through an NICHD grant to the Kennedy Center of Vanderbilt University (P30 HD-15052) and NCRR/NIH grant 1 UL1 RR024975. This paper is based on the first author’s doctoral dissertation. Thank you to the families who participated in the research, to Will Macintosh, Ellen O’Neal, and Aline Studstill for coding help, to Gwen and Bethany Rittle-Johnson for help filming our training video, to Susan Strouse for her role as the dialogic actress, and to the many others who helped with data collection. David Dickinson, Amy Needham, Bethany RittleJohnson, and Megan Saylor provided extremely helpful feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.
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Gabrielle Strouse is now at the University of Michigan. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Gabrielle Strouse, School of Education, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48105. Phone: (734) 615-8189
Email:
[email protected]
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Young preschoolers rapidly acquire new information from social partners but do not learn efficiently from people on video. We trained parents to use Whitehurst’s dialogic reading questioning techniques while watching educational television with their children. Eighty-one parents co-viewed storybook videos with their 3-year-old children in 1 of 4 conditions: dialogic questioning (pause, ask questions, and encourage children to tell parts of the story), directed attention (pause and comment but do not ask questions), dialogic actress (show the videos with dialogic questioning by an on-screen actress embedded in them), or no intervention (show the videos as usual). After 4 weeks, children in the dialogic questioning group scored higher than children in the directed attention and no-intervention groups on story comprehension and story vocabulary measures. Scores from the dialogic actress group fell in between. On a standardized measure of expressive vocabulary, children in the two parent-interaction groups exhibited significant improvement over their pretest scores. Results indicate that parent-led questioning enhances children’s learning from video stories at age 3, and that a video incorporating an onscreen dialogic questioner may also be effective. Mechanisms behind the effect of dialogic reading-style interventions are discussed. Keywords: dialogic reading, vocabulary, comprehension, video, parent-child coviewing
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Effective Co-Viewing: Preschoolers’ Learning from Video After a Dialogic Questioning Intervention Parent-child picture book “reading” is a common activity of early childhood in many cultures. Because most preschoolers cannot read alone, engagement with storybooks is usually an activity shared between children and parents (Gelman, Coley, Rosengren, Hartman, & Pappas, 1998). In contrast, watching television or video often is a solitary occupation for young children. Although two-third (68%) of American parents said they were in the room all or most of the time when their young children were watching TV (Rideout & Hamel, 2006), simply being present (co-viewing) is not the same as active mediation – the less-common situation of a parent and child talking about televised material before, during, or after viewing (Barkin, Ip, Richardson, Klinepeter, Finch, & Krcmar, 2006; Nathanson, 2001). In fact, parent-reported coviewing typically involves children who happen to be in the room when the parents are watching television rather than families watching children’s programs together (St. Peters, Fitch, Huston, Wright, & Eakins, 1991). Interacting with children around video may not come naturally to parents. While reading a book, a parent can pause to ask questions and probe children's understanding, but there often is no pause in the action on a video. Parents know that their preschoolers cannot read picture books alone. In contrast, video is a kind of symbolic medium that seems “transparent” or obvious to adults, who easily interpret video images and learn from screen media (Troseth, Pierroutsakos, & DeLoache, 2004). Therefore, parents may assume that young children, even infants, will learn from video without adult intervention. Additionally, TV and videos may serve a different function for families than books do—to keep children busy while parents do chores (Guernsey, 2007). Regardless of the reason parents do not discuss what children are watching, they may not
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realize that they are missing a potential opportunity to make video watching truly “educational”. In the research reported here, we will demonstrate the effectiveness of a particular type of parent interaction that provides both social and cognitive support for preschool children’s learning from video stories. Despite the claims of marketers of videos purporting to turn babies into geniuses, research indicates that learning from the symbolic medium of video is not automatic, especially at younger ages. For instance, although being from English-speaking families, 9-month-old infants who repeatedly observed a Mandarin speaker reading books and talking about toys “in person” could differentiate Mandarin speech sounds at 10 months. In contrast, 9-month-olds who watched the same speaker on video failed to differentiate the sounds; they showed no evidence of having been exposed to Mandarin (Kuhl, Tsao, & Liu, 2003). In other research, infants who were shown a popular baby video designed to teach vocabulary for a month demonstrated no greater vocabulary knowledge than a control group who had not seen the video (DeLoache et al., 2010; Robb, Reichert, & Wartella, 2009). However, children whose parents received only a list of the words from the video with the suggestion, “Teach your children these words in any way that seems natural” learned significantly more words than the control group. Toddlers’ relative lack of learning from video compared to their learning from real people and events is such a common research finding that Anderson and Pempek (2005) coined the term, “the video deficit” to describe this pattern of results. In a study with this age group, 24and 30-month-olds were given a challenging word learning task: follow the speakers’ gaze into an opaque bucket and realize she was labeling an out-of-sight object hidden there. When the speaker was present, toddlers learned the word, but they failed to learn when she appeared and labeled the object on a video (Troseth, Strouse, Verdine, O’Doherty, & Saylor, 2012). In follow-
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up studies, what helped toddlers learn was their parents helping them identify the object being labeled on the video (Strouse & Troseth, 2012) or interacting with the on-screen actress while their children watched (Strouse, Troseth, O’Doherty, & Verdine, 2012). Slightly older children (30- to 35-month-olds) failed to learn a novel verb (uttered in a voiceover) that accompanied a video of a puppet repeatedly engaging in a distinctive action. Children of this age did learn the verb if the action first was demonstrated by a labeler who was present, and then was shown on video. Even 3-year-olds (36 to 42 months) did not learn verbs as well from video as when the labeler was present (i.e., they did not pass a stringent word learning test—Roseberry, HirshPasek, Parish-Morris, & Golinkoff, 2009). Across these early years, live social interaction helped young children learn from video. The lack of interaction between people on video and viewers may be one reason very young children have trouble learning words (and other information) from this symbolic medium (Nielsen, Simcock, & Jenkins, 2008; Troseth, Saylor, & Archer, 2006). According to Naigles and Mayeux (2001) new words often are learned in situations of joint attention – when an adult and child know that they are focused on the same thing, and the adult can provide clear information about his or her point of reference. When the adult and child are not initially focused on the same object, the child will check the speaker's face and orient his/her own gaze to the adult's object of reference (Baldwin, 1991). Although a child may be able to follow the gaze of a person on video, the actor cannot know where the child is attending or give contingent (or even accurate) feedback or clarification, in the way an adult reading a storybook can. Parental support through active mediation – that is, engaging with a child in joint attention toward a video – may enhance young children’s learning by providing this contingent interaction. In an early study of the effects of watching Sesame Street, Ball and Bogatz (1970)
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noted, “Children who watched Sesame Street the most – and hence learned the most – tended to have mothers who often watched the show with them and often talked to them about it” (p.14). Likewise, Singer and Singer (1998) highlighted the “critical role of adult mediation in effective teaching” (p. 314); indeed, children in their studies who received teacher support along with viewing Barney & Friends outscored children who simply watched the program. In active mediation, an adult both offers social support for learning (e.g., helps a child focus attention on the video) and engages a child cognitively (e.g., encourages them to reason and talk about the video’s contents). Thus, although learning from video does improve across the preschool years, an actively engaged adult co-viewer may facilitate deeper and more efficient learning. Research with another symbolic medium—picture books—suggests that active mediation promotes learning. Children whose parents discuss story content with them before, during, and after book reading, especially those children who hear rare words explained, understand the stories better (e.g., Morrow, 1984; Strasser, Larrain, & Lissi, in press). In Strasser and colleagues’ study, children who were asked questions about the coherence of the story (causeeffect relations, goals, feelings, thoughts, and causes for feelings) comprehended more than those asked other types of open-ended questions (e.g., descriptions and predictions). Following classroom-based or parent-child shared-reading interventions, children’s comprehension of new stories (told during testing) and their skill at forming inferences improved (Dickinson & Smith, 1994; Koskinen et al., 2000; Lonigan, Anthony, Bloomfield, Dyer, & Samwel, 1999; Gest, Freeman, Domitrovich, & Welsh, 2004; van Kleeck, Woude, & Hammett, 2006). Thus, interaction during shared reading has positive effects on children’s story comprehension. Joint parent-child reading also is associated with larger preschool vocabularies and better emergent literacy skills (letter naming, phoneme blending, etc.—Bus, van IJzendoorn, &
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Pellegrini, 1995). Blewitt, Rump, Shealy, and Cook (2009) suggest a “scaffolding” hypothesis for vocabulary acquisition through storybook reading – that children learn best when adults adapt their behaviors based on the preschoolers’ level of knowledge. First, adults help children learn to recognize a spoken word and its meaning using simple questioning and labeling of the referent picture. Pointing and repetition are other simple, effective techniques for increasing preschoolers’ receptive vocabulary (Ard & Beverly, 2004; Justice, 2002; Sénéchal, 1997; Sénéchal, Thomas, & Monker, 1995). Once children have appropriately mapped between word and meaning, adults should adapt their scaffolding: ask more complex questions, talk about other instances of the named category, and give children opportunities to use the word. Allowing children to first master the word’s meaning provides context for their later retrieval (from long term memory) and practice. Novel examples of the word’s referent then can be incorporated in memory to create a more flexible, robust understanding of the word (Blewitt et al., 2009). Research has shown that electronic books (e-books) contain some features that support learning even in the absence of parent mediation (Bus, de Jong, & Verhallen, 2006; Chera & Wood, 2003; de Jong & Bus, 2004; Korat & Shamir, 2008, 2012). However, features such as animations and games unrelated to the text can be distracting or non-informative (de Jong & Bus, 2002; Chiong, Ree, Takeuchi, & Erickson, 2012). To help navigate these features, parent scaffolding remains an important support that increases gains in word reading, phonological awareness, and concepts of print (Segal-Drori, Korat, Shamir, & Klein, 2010). Additionally, research has shown that spontaneous scaffolding of interactions may differ with varied media formats. For example, Korat and Or (2010) found that while co-reading an electronic book with their parents, children responded more to their parent’s questions and asked more of their own questions than when reading a traditional print book. Kim and Anderson (2008) observed that
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electronic texts prompted more parent-child talk about things that were not physically or temporally present than print texts. Thus, e-books may promote more cognitively complex and challenging parent supports, which could increase children’s comprehension and learning of literacy skills. One well-studied reading program based on scaffolding principles is dialogic reading. Whitehurst and colleagues (1988) initially developed the method with parents reading to their 2year-old children at home. Dialogic reading has since been shown to be effective when implemented by teachers in classrooms (Aram, 2006; Hargrave & Sénéchal, 2000; Lonigan & Whitehurst, 1998; Wasik & Bond, 2001; Wasik, Bond, & Hindman, 2006; Whitehurst, et al, 1999; Whitehurst, Arnold, et al., 1994), with children through age 5 (Aram, 2006; Hargrave & Sénéchal, 2000; Lonigan & Whitehurst, 1998; Wasik & Bond, 2001; Wasik et al., 2006; Whitehurst et al., 1999), with Chinese-speaking children (Chow, McBride-Chang, Cheung, & Chow, 2008), with children at risk for reading difficulty (Coyne, Simmons, Kame’enui, & Stoolmiller, 2004), and for low-income populations (Lonigan & Whitehurst, 1998; ValdezMenchaca & Whitehurst, 1992; Whitehurst, Arnold, et al., 1994; Whitehurst, Epstein, et al., 1994; Whitehurst et al., 1999). Numerous studies of the program are reviewed by Mol, Bus, de Jong, and Smeets (2008). Dialogic reading encourages parents to scaffold reading interactions, using strategies that have been shown to enhance children’s vocabulary acquisition (Whitehurst et al., 1988). Following the mnemonic C-R-O-W-D, parents are taught to use prompts to encourage their children to be active participants. They begin with simple Completion (fill in the blank), Recall (“What happened?”) and Wh- (who, what, when, where, etc.) prompts. Asking children to identify objects and simple actions in the story acquaints them with new words, increasing their
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receptive vocabulary (Ewers & Brownson, 1999; Sénéchal, 1997). Across repeated readings of the story, parents are encouraged to elicit more complex answers requiring deeper cognitive processing. Open-ended prompts such as, “What do you think will happen next?” encourage children to tell parts of the story by making inferences and explaining cause-effect relations. Distancing prompts encourage children to connect elements of the story to their own experiences. For children who already have a relatively high vocabulary level, complex prompts are especially effective (Reese & Cox, 1999), increasing the quality and quantity of children’s talk as they retrieve and use new words during book reading (Kertoy, 1994). Parents use the mnemonic P-E-E-R, to structure each interaction: Prompt (ask your child a question), Evaluate (praise a correct answer or gently correct an incorrect one), Expand (add to your child’s response), and Repeat (have your child repeat his/her answer—Whitehurst, Epstein, et al., 1994). The P-E-E-R structure builds scaffolding into interactions, with the parent following up on information the child offers. Thus, dialogic reading methods invite the kinds of parental interaction Blewitt and colleagues (2009) proposed in their scaffolding hypothesis for language acquisition through storybook reading. The emphasis on scaffolding, repetition, and using prompts of increasing complexity makes dialogic reading an effective technique to help children learn vocabulary through storybook reading. But these techniques also support word learning in general (Beals & De Temple, 1992; McNeill, 1970; Weizman & Snow, 2001). Parents may be able to use the same dialogic questioning techniques that have been extensively studied with storybooks to enhance children’s word learning from other everyday experiences, such as video watching. We propose three mechanisms by which parental mediation could support preschoolers' learning from video: increased attention, enhanced cognitive processing, and social feedback.
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There is some evidence that adult-child interaction during video viewing can enhance children’s positive affect and attention. Low-income Israeli children whose mothers co-viewed Sesame Street enjoyed the program significantly more than children whose mothers were not encouraged to co-view (Salomon, 1977). Although Salomon did not investigate what mothers were doing during co-viewing, he hypothesized that they served as a source of reinforcement, guiding their child’s focus to the program. Salomon describes what we are calling the attention and social feedback mechanisms for enhanced learning, aspects of the triadic interaction involving a child, a parent, and the video. Attention has to do with parents focusing their own attention on the screen, modeling that attention for children. Social feedback has to do with responding to what is on the screen and to the child, motivating children to contemplate the contents, helping them interpret video-presented information and relate it to real life, as has happened in laboratorybased search and word-learning tasks (e.g., Strouse & Troseth, 2012; Troseth et al., 2006). Additionally, parental scaffolding (e.g., repetition/elaboration on the televised content) may help children interpret and store the information for later use (we have termed this the cognitive explanation). Researchers have proposed that adult mediation during reading facilitates children’s encoding by (1) providing additional details about and repetition of the content (Sénéchal, 1997), (2) giving children practice retrieving information from memory (Sénéchal et al., 1995), and (3) giving them a chance to rehearse the content (Kertoy, 1994; Whitehurst et al., 1988). Similar cognitive benefits may occur during joint video watching. For example, adult labeling can lead preschoolers to better remember and generalize pro-social information presented on screen (Friedrich & Stein, 1975; Singer & Singer, 1998; Watkins, Calvert, HustonStein, & Wright, 1980).
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To date, little research has focused on parent mediation of preschoolers’ learning from educational videos. Reiser and colleagues had 3- and 4-year-olds watch Sesame Street with an adult who asked them to identify letters and numbers (Reiser, Tessmer, & Phelps, 1984; Reiser, Williamson, & Suzuki, 1988). These children scored higher on a posttest of letters and numbers than others who watched with the adult but did not converse, a result providing strong support for the idea that adult mediation can improve preschoolers’ learning of pre-literacy skills from video. In discussing their results, the researchers suggested what we are terming the attention explanation for the effect of co-viewing: that adult-led questioning increases the effort children put into understanding the program, and cues them that the program should be taken seriously. However, the procedures used by Reiser and colleagues cannot distinguish between the attention explanation and other proposed mechanisms (cognitive and social feedback). The studies described above suggest that parental interaction in general may enhance preschoolers’ learning from video. In the current research, we attempted to examine the specific mechanisms (attention, cognitive, social) that may play a role in parent support of young children’s learning from video. We trained parents of 3-year-olds to use dialogic questioning techniques around videos and investigated whether the same types of parental interactions that increased preschoolers’ vocabulary learning from storybooks also increased vocabulary learning and story comprehension from video. Dialogic reading has been more effective at raising vocabulary scores of 2- and 3-year-old children than older children (Mol et al., 2008). We were concerned that some of our outcome measures would be too difficult for 2-year-olds, but future research should include 2-year-olds using age-appropriate measures. In earlier studies, dialogic reading had a stronger effect on expressive than on receptive vocabulary growth (Mol et al., 2008), probably because children in comparison groups were read
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to "as usual”—an activity associated with receptive vocabulary growth, especially when the same books are read repeatedly (Scarborough & Dobrich, 1994; Sénéchal, 1997). Hence, the advantage of dialogic techniques (which encourage children to express themselves) over reading “as usual” may be more pronounced when measuring growth in expressive vocabulary. Although our intervention was relatively short (4 weeks), we assessed whether children in the dialogic questioning group improved more on measures of expressive vocabulary compared to children in the other groups. We believed that dialogic questioning would boost story comprehension, an outcome that rarely has been studied in preschoolers, although researchers have stressed its importance (van Den Broek et al., 2005). For instance, Wh- prompts (e.g., “why” questions) may help children think about the causal structure of events, promoting recall (c.f. Bauer, 1997; van den Broek, Lorch, & Thurlow, 1996; Wenner & Bauer, 1999). Parents’ use of “why” questions also may help children think about characters’ feelings and understand their behavior, given that children whose parents discuss feelings can more easily infer the internal states/motives of others (Brown & Dunn, 1996). We also predicted that reminding children of their own related experiences through distancing prompts could increase story comprehension, because having background knowledge facilitates learning (Chi & Koeske, 1983; Gobbo & Chi, 1986). To identify the mechanisms that make active mediation (in the form of dialogic questioning) effective, we asked parents in another condition to direct their children’s attention to events on the screen but not to ask questions at all (see Table 1). We reasoned that children in this condition might benefit from their parent’s social contingency (social feedback mechanism) and encouragement to focus on the video story (attention mechanism), but that minimizing giveand-take discussion would lead to less elaboration on and rehearsal of story content by both
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parties (cognitive mechanism). A control group watched the video stories at home as they would usually watch television. A final group of children saw an actress on the video using dialogic questioning techniques in place of the parent. It may seem logical that parental scaffolding would increase children’s vocabulary and comprehension of the video. But not all parents are good at scaffolding, or parents may be too busy to provide it. Children in the dialogic actress group missed out on the social contingency and feedback that a parent would offer, as well as carefully crafted questions specific to their own level of knowledge (social feedback mechanism). However, by interacting with the actress, they could benefit from enhanced engagement (attention mechanism) along with repetition and elaboration of the content in the stories (cognitive mechanism). We hypothesized that children in the dialogic questioning group would understand the stories better and learn more vocabulary words than children in the other conditions, as they would receive the benefit of all three proposed mechanisms – attention, cognitive, and social feedback. We expected that children in the directed attention and dialogic actress conditions (who would benefit from two of the mechanisms, as outlined in Table 1) would both outscore the control group. This pattern of results would imply that contingent social interaction is an important learning mechanism, but that good video design can aid children's learning from video when a social partner is not available. Although our analysis would not isolate the effect of individual mechanisms (which co-occur in adult behavior), the expected pattern would suggest that each of the proposed mechanisms has an independent, cumulative effect. Method Participants
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Participants were 115 families of children aged 36 to 48 months from a metropolitan area in the southern U.S., located via birth records and recruited by telephone. Thirty-four of these children were not included in the final analyses: 4 did not cooperate at the first visit, 23 did not return for all visits, 5 had not been shown the videos for all 4 weeks, and 2 were suspected to have a language or other developmental delay. Therefore, the final sample included 81 children who were assigned to one of four conditions: dialogic questioning (n = 20, M = 41.86 months, SD = 4.03), directed attention (n = 21, M = 42.42 months, SD = 3.75), a regular video control group (n = 20, M = 42.26 months, SD = 3.96), or dialogic actress (n = 20, M = 41.86 months, SD = 4.03) with gender and vocabulary score balanced across conditions. Children who participated had normal hearing and no developmental delays, were learning English as their primary language, and did not own the video or book of the target stories. The overwhelming majority of participating parents were mothers (91%). A majority of the final sample identified their ethnicity as White (94%), with 2 participants identifying themselves as Black (2.5%), 1 as Indian (1.2%) and 1 as Hispanic (1.2%). The mean and median level of education of the participating parent was “some graduate work” (5.06 on a 7-point rating scale) with the sample ranging from “some college” to “doctoral degree”, and the mean and median household income bracket was $75-$100,000 (4.95 on a 6-point rating scale) with the sample ranging from “less than $15,000” to “over $150,000”. Materials Training video. Parents in the dialogic questioning group watched a training video based on Read Together, Talk Together (Berner, 2002), a video successfully used to train parents in dialogic reading techniques for storybooks (Blom-Hoffman, O'Neil-Pirozzi, & Cutting, 2006). Our training video included instructions on dialogic techniques, scenes of puppets demonstrating
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each technique, and a real parent and child using the technique while viewing a storybook video. For example, the narrator explained that distancing prompts involve “trying to connect something in the video to something in the child’s life.” Then mother and child puppets, while reading a story about a birthday cake, discussed the child’s most recent birthday cake. Finally, the real mother on the training video, while watching a video of “Little Red Riding Hood,” asked her child, “Who else do we know that goes down the chimney?” Storybooks on video. During the course of the study, all families received DVDs containing sets of Scholastic stories. We chose four relatively unfamiliar stories that also included a sufficient number of words unknown to children in this age group, as determined by surveying families visiting our lab for other studies. Over the first two weeks, participants watched “A Weekend with Wendell” and “The Wizard” (Weston Woods Studios, 2001). Over the second two weeks they watched “Bear Snores On” and “The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge” (Weston Woods Studios, 2003). A fifth video (“Bark, George,” Weston Woods Studios, 2003) was used during in-lab training for the dialogic actress condition. Children in the dialogic questioning, directed attention, and regular video conditions watched the unaltered commercially available videos, consisting of static storybook pages with very light animation and a voiceover of an adult reading the story. The DVDs included optional story text across the bottom of the screen (similar to subtitles; families chose whether to have the text on or off). Children in the dialogic actress condition watched the same four stories altered to include a small picture-in-picture window in the corner of the main story image. The window featured an actress (“Miss Sue”) who asked questions using dialogic techniques; after each, the main story picture remained paused for 2 seconds to let the child answer before continuing. The original training video for dialogic reading (Berner, 2002) suggested that parents ask questions
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once per page. During their final lab visit, the first seven parents in the dialogic questioning condition paused the “Bear Snores On” video to ask questions an average of 20 times— approximately the number of pages in the book. Therefore, the actress on our videos asked questions at the same rate (17 to 26 prompts per story). Because an important element of dialogic questioning is building from simple to more complex questions, we created two versions of the dialogic actress video for each story. Parents were asked to show their child the version with simpler questions 3 to 5 times during the first week of viewing and the version with more complex questions 3 to 5 times during the second week. Some of the actress’ questions involved vocabulary words to be tested, and two involved comprehension questions. Story Comprehension. We generated questions about one of the videos for Weeks 3-4, “Bear Snores On”, which were pilot tested on ten 3-year-olds who watched the video in the lab. Questions were adjusted to be suitably challenging after repeated viewings, but the story comprehension measure also included some questions children of this age could easily answer (to keep them motivated and interested). The final instrument included 10 questions varying in difficulty, with an internal consistency of alpha = .59. Preschoolers can draw causal inferences between concrete events (Bauer & Mandler, 1989), the first type of relation children are able to identify in stories (van Den Broek et al., 2005). Therefore, most comprehension questions involved identifying actions from the story. We included a few challenging questions (e.g., “Why was the bear sad?”), reasoning that they would be very difficult for 3-year-olds to answer on their own, but might be a good indicator of what children could answer with adult help (i.e., the benefit of dialogic questioning). We also incorporated some story information in the questions as a verbal reminder, since this facilitates young children’s recall (Bauer, 1996).
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Vocabulary assessment. Children were pre- and post-tested on the Expressive One Word Picture Vocabulary Test (EOW-PVT; Brownell, 2000). This standardized measure has been widely used in dialogic reading studies, allowing the most direct comparison to prior research. Because of the relatively short duration of our study compared to previous research, we expected gains on a standardized measure to be minimal. Therefore, we also developed a story-specific expressive vocabulary measure that included target words from each of the videos. In earlier book-reading studies, children have demonstrated expressive vocabulary gains on story-specific measures (Hargrave & Sénéchal, 2000; Whitehurst, Arnold et al., 1994). We chose nouns from our four storybook videos that referred to items that were both pictured on the screen and included in the spoken text. We pilot tested the words by asking 10 mothers to identify the words they thought their 3-year-old children already used. The final measure included seven nouns from each pair of stories known by 50% or less of the pilot children. Each list included one high frequency word (mentioned more than 10 times in one of the stories and included in its title), two medium frequency words (occurring 2 to 9 times in a story), and four rare words (occurring only once in a story). At pre-test, the most familiar target words were known by 18 of the 81 children (22%) and the least familiar target words were known by none of the children. The 14-item measure had a post-test internal consistency of alpha = .66. During the test, children first were asked to name each of the target objects from a set of screenshots taken directly from the videos. These still images (printed on laminated cards) depicted each target item in its surrounding story context. This measure tested whether children had learned the words as labels for the objects as they appeared in the video. Next, children were asked to name the objects from a set of novel drawings of the same kinds of objects (Figure 1),
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which tested whether children could apply the labels outside the context of the videos—that is, whether they had acquired general knowledge of the meaning of the words. Procedures Training. Families came to the lab before, at the middle, and at the end of a month’s video watching at home. During the initial lab visit, while children were completing the pre-test, parents in all groups discussed the study procedures with a researcher. Additionally, on each of their first two lab visits, parents in the dialogic questioning group watched the training video. Parents were given a copy of the training video to take home as well as a handout outlining the steps in the dialogic sequences and the types of prompts that could be used 1. Parents in the directed attention, regular video, and dialogic actress groups were not exposed to the training video. We did not expect parents to engage in many dialogic techniques spontaneously, as research has indicated that their use is fairly uncommon prior to training (Briesch, Chafouleas, Lebel, & Blom-Hoffman, 2008; Wasik et al., 2006). Parents of children in the directed attention group received a short handout and a verbal explanation of the procedures to follow at home. The handout reminded them to pause the storybook video about once per page and direct their child's attention to what was happening on screen, but not to ask questions. The goal of this condition was to encourage parents to interact socially with their children around the video, without giving children the benefit of questioning. Children in the dialogic actress group were introduced to a practice video that we created using the Scholastic Story "Bark, George." Miss Sue, the dialogic actress, appeared in a picturein-picture screen on the video and directed questions about the story to the viewer approximately once per page. During this practice, an experimenter watched the video with the child, pausing it
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Handout available as supplemental material
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if necessary and encouraging the child to respond to Miss Sue's questions. Two coders reviewed videotapes of the practice of 17 children (3 videotapes were lost). All responded directly to Miss Sue (without prompting) at least once. Parents in the dialogic actress group were instructed not to pause the storybook videos at home and not to prompt children to answer, but rather to play the videos through without commenting on the actress or directing their child's attention. We told parents we were specifically interested in what children learned from Miss Sue on their own. Video viewing intervention. Parents in all four conditions were instructed to show “A Weekend with Wendell” and “The Wizard” to their child 3 to 5 times per week for the first 2 weeks. Parents in the dialogic questioning and directed attention groups were instructed to watch the video with their child, and use the techniques they were taught during training. All parents were given a diary to record the dates of viewing. The dialogic questioning, directed attention, and regular video groups viewed the commercial version of the video (DVD), whereas the dialogic actress group received two lab-created versions of the video/DVD (with simpler questions for Week 1 and more complex, difficult questions for Week 2). Following the study design of Whitehurst and colleagues (1988), families returned to the lab after 2 weeks and exchanged their DVD(s) for new a new set of stories. Parents were instructed to have their children watch “Bear Snores On” and “The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Grey Bridge” (either the commercial or the two lab-created versions, depending on condition) during the final 2 weeks, following the instructions and techniques for their condition. Assessments. Initial and Midpoint visits. During their first lab visit, a trained researcher pre-tested children on the EOW-PVT and the story-specific vocabulary measure for the first two stories. At the 2-week midpoint of the intervention, children were post-tested in the lab on the story-specific
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vocabulary measure for the stories they had finished watching (the first 7 target words). They also were pre-tested on the story-specific vocabulary measure for the stories they would be watching in the final 2 weeks (the second set of 7 words). Final visit. At the end of the month intervention, families returned to the lab. Children were post-tested on the EOW-PVT as a measure of expressive vocabulary growth. Then, after being instructed to “watch the way you have been watching at home,” families watched the “Bear Snores On” video. The session was videotaped for later review for fidelity of implementation, to ensure that parents in the dialogic questioning group were using dialogic techniques, and that those in the other groups were not. Reviewing the video also let us assess whether parents adopted some questioning techniques more easily than others, and what kinds of conversations families were having in each condition. Children then were asked to complete the story comprehension measure and the story-specific vocabulary test for all four stories (testing children’s learning of 7 new target words and their retention of the 7 words from Weeks 1-2). Questionnaires. Before or during their first lab visit, parents completed a 26-item questionnaire about their child’s experience with media such as television, home videos, and picture books. During the intervention, parents completed weekly diaries indicating how frequently their children viewed the videos at home. A few questions probed whether parents enjoyed the videos, whether they paused them, and what they talked about with their children during the videos. At their final lab visit, parents also completed an exit questionnaire of openended items that allowed them to comment on how useful they found the techniques and whether they would use them during other activities (e.g., while reading story books). Results
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It was important to first establish the similarity of the groups and the fidelity of parents’ implementation of the intervention. These results are presented first, followed by analyses of data from the outcome measures. Demographics There was no difference between conditions on household income level in a univariate ANOVA, F(3,69) = 0.18, p = .908, ηρ2 = 0.01, but there was a significant difference in the participating parent’s level of education, F(3,76) = 2.91, p = .040, ηρ2 = 0.10 (directed attention: M = 5.62, SD = 1.20; regular video: M = 5.10, SD = 1.12; dialogic questioning: M = 4.95, SD = 1.22; dialogic actress: M = 4.55, SD = 1.15). Although this difference may have given an advantage to children in the directed attention and regular video (control) groups, they did not perform systematically higher on the outcome measures and there was no correlation between parent education and any outcome. Also, there was no condition difference in household education (both parents’ scores averaged together), F(3,76) = 1.08, p = .362, ηρ2 = 0.04. The number of hours per week parents reported that their children watched television, F(1,76) = 0.36, p = .78, ηρ2 = .01, and read books, F(1,76) = 0.86, p = .47, ηρ2 = .03, and whether or not children recognized letters and wrote their names (p’s = .74 and .75 respectively, 2-tailed Fisher’s exact tests) were all statistically equivalent across condition. Fidelity of Implementation Story exposure. To check that parents followed directions, we averaged the number of times parents reported that children watched each of the four stories at home (M = 7.49 viewings of each storybook video, SD = 1.78, min = 4.5, max = 15.0). There was no effect of condition on the number of times children watched the videos, F(3,77) = 0.71, p = .55, ηρ2 = 0.03.
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Parents reported that they viewed the story videos with their children “almost always” (4 = always; 0 = not at all). There was an (expected) effect of condition, F(3,75) = 6.85, p < .001, ηρ2 = 0.22. Follow-up contrasts indicated that parents co-viewed more in the dialogic questioning (M = 3.60, SD = 0.47) and directed attention groups (M = 3.82, SD = 0.35) than in the regular video (M = 3.05, SD = 0.92) and dialogic actress groups (M = 2.89, SD = 1.05). On average, children watched with siblings “once in a while” (M = 1.57, SD = 1.44) and equally often across conditions, F(3,75) = 1.70, p = .17, ηρ2 = 0.06. During the final lab visit, we asked children and their parents to watch “Bear Snores On” using the viewing method they used at home. Children in the dialogic questioning group spent significantly longer watching the video in the lab (M = 12:06, SD = 1:33) than children in the other groups did (dialogic actress M = 9:43, SD = 0:01, directed attention M = 8:25, SD = 1:20, regular video M = 6:41, SD = 0:01), F(3,75) = 95.03, p < .001, ηρ2 = 0.79, due to the video being paused while parents asked questions. Bonferroni tests indicated that all group differences were significant. This in-lab result suggests that children in the dialogic questioning group may have been exposed to the videos longer at home than the other children (although they did not see the videos any more often). Dialogic techniques. We reviewed videos of the in-lab viewing sessions for how frequently parents paused the video and the amount and type of questioning parents in the regular video (control) group did spontaneously and parents in the dialogic group did when on their best behavior (i.e., when they knew they were being observed). Pauses were consensus coded by two coders. No parent in the regular video or dialogic actress conditions paused the 8minute “Bear Snores On” video at all. Parents in the dialogic questioning group paused the video significantly more times (M = 18.21, SD = 8.11) than parents in the directed attention
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group did (M = 12.81, SD = 6.98), t(38) = 2.26, p = .029, d = .73. Given that they were instructed to pause roughly once per minute, both groups exceeded the expected number of pauses. Pausing at home more closely matched the once-per-minute guideline (with most parents in both groups reporting 5 to 10 pauses per video) yet parents in the dialogic questioning group still reported significantly more pauses, t(37) = 2.21, p = .033, d = 0.73. In the lab, while being observed, parents in the dialogic questioning group “outdid themselves” in pausing to question; thus, the magnitude of difference in the length of video exposure between conditions in the lab may overestimate the actual differences in viewing time at home. We also coded the number and type of prompts—verbal attempts to elicit story-related responses—parents used during the final lab visit. These were almost always questions, but could also be statements meant to elicit a response (usually completion prompts or fill-in-theblanks). A significant main effect of condition favored parents in the dialogic questioning group, F(3, 76) = 110.88, p < .001, ηρ2 = .81; they prompted an average of 53.95 times (SD = 2.43) in the lab, or approximately 3 prompts per pause, whereas parents in all other groups prompted very little (directed attention: M = 5.14, SD = 2.31; regular video: M = 3.30, SD = 2.37; dialogic actress: M = 1.35, SD = 2.37). Thus, the dialogic questioning technique did increase parent-child interaction around the video. Parents in the dialogic questioning group used wh- prompts most frequently (33%), followed by open-ended (9.6%), recall (8.7%), distancing (5.4%), and completion prompts (2.4%). The remainder were story-relevant but unclassified—typically, yes/no or multiple-choice questions, such as, “Is it summer or winter?” Response to the actress. Miss Sue, the dialogic actress on the video, prompted 24 times during the “Bear Snores On” video (once or twice per pause). Two coders scored the responsiveness of children in the dialogic actress condition to the actress’s on-screen prompts
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during the final visit. Inter-rater reliability was calculated for 20% of the prompts, κ = .86, p < .001. The experimenter was not in the room and parents were instructed to watch the video “as they did at home”. Although parents had been instructed not to prompt children’s responses at home, some still did so during the final lab visit: children responded to Miss Sue’s prompts 60% of the time on their own, 3% with prompting, and made no response 37% of the time. These results corresponded to parents’ diaries—all reported their child responding to the dialogic actress at least sometimes at home. A repeated-measures ANOVA indicated no effect of story on children's responsiveness to the actress at home, F(3,57) = 0.66, p = .58, ηρ2 = 0.03. Child language. We predicted that parent-child talk during viewing sessions would influence children’s comprehension and expressive vocabulary. Therefore, we transcribed and counted the number of utterance morphemes children produced while watching Bear Snores On in the lab. Inter-rater reliability for 20% of the sample, calculated using the ICC (intraclass correlation coefficient) was r = .99. In previous book-reading studies, children in dialogic reading groups have consistently produced more words and phrases than children in control groups (e.g., Lonigan & Whitehurst, 1998; Valdez-Menchaca & Whitehurst, 1992; Whitehurst et al., 1988). As expected, there was a main effect of condition, F(3, 77) = 24.02, p < .001, ηρ2 = .45, with children in the dialogic questioning group producing the most talk (M = 45.00 utterances, SD = 23.29; dialogic actress, M = 19.45, SD = 10.96; directed attention, M = 16.38, SD = 10.51; regular video, M = 11.90, SD = 8.69). The ratio of child utterances to prompts (M = 54 from the parents and 24 from the actress) was approximately 80% for both dialogic groups. Outcome Measures Story comprehension. At the final visit, children received up to 10 points for correctly answering questions about events in “Bear Snores On”, which they had just watched with their
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parent. Planned contrasts indicated that children in the dialogic questioning group outscored children in the directed attention (t(77) = 2.32, p = .023, d = 0.53) and regular video groups (t(77) = 3.07, p = .003, d = 0.70), showing enhanced understanding of the story content (Table 2). However, the scores of children in the dialogic questioning group were not significantly higher than those of children in the dialogic actress group (t(77) = 1.83, p = .071, d = 0.42). Story-specific vocabulary. We calculated children's total vocabulary scores for words from the four stories. Separate totals (out of 14) were calculated for producing the target words in reference to the screenshots from the stories and for generalizing target words to the drawings. At pre-test, there was no difference between groups on either measure. Children in all four conditions had significantly better vocabulary scores in response to the screenshots after viewing the videos than at pre-test, indicating that all children (even those who watched without active mediation) learned the names of some target items from the videos. In a series of planned contrasts using EOW-PVT pre-test scores as a covariate (to control for children’s individual language abilities), the story-specific vocabulary scores of the dialogic questioning group were significantly higher than those of the directed attention group, t(76), = 2.74, p = .008, d = 0.63, and of the regular video group, t(76), = 3.16, p = .002, d = 0.72, showing the added benefit of questioning. The scores of the dialogic questioning group were somewhat higher than those of the dialogic actress group, but again this difference did not reach conventional levels of significance, t(76), = 1.80, p = .061, d = 0.41 (Table 3). Across all conditions, children acquired words that were repeated more times in the story narration. A summary of the acquisition of specific vocabulary words used in “Bear Snores On” can be found in Table 4. Words that occurred more frequently in the story were mentioned more often by parents and children. There was a main effect of condition in the use of target words,
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F(3, 76) = 17.82, p < .001, ηρ2 = .41. Families in the dialogic questioning group used the words much more (M = 10.47, SD = 7.90) than families in all of the other groups (directed attention, M = 4.10, SD = 4.63; dialogic actress, M = 1.45, SD = 1.54; regular video, M = 0.70, SD = 1.26). Thus, repetition may be one mechanism underlying the beneficial effect of active mediation. When they were asked to identify novel drawings of the target objects, children in all groups displayed a small but significant amount of growth in story-specific vocabulary from preto post-test. None of the planned contrasts comparing post-test scores between groups were significant. Therefore, active mediation for 2 weeks did not seem to increase children’s generalizing of words from video to new exemplars in new contexts. On the final testing day, children also received a retention score on the 7 story-specific words from the videos they viewed for the first two weeks. There were no significant effects in a repeated-measure analysis of covariance with post-test scores (after week 2) and retention test scores (after week 4) as the repeated measure and pre-test as the covariate, either for the screenshots or the drawings. These results indicated that, although there was differential learning across conditions after the first 2-week viewing period, children in all groups then retained whatever words they had learned from the videos for an additional 2 weeks. Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test. In previous dialogic reading studies, the expressive vocabulary scores of children who received dialogic scaffolding tended to improve across the study duration (from 6 weeks to an entire school year). To evaluate group differences in EOW-PVT post-test scores after the 4 weeks of our study, the score of the dialogic questioning group was compared to those of each of the other groups in a series of planned contrasts, using EOW-PVT pre-test as a covariate. There were no significant differences in these analyses (see Table 3 for group means). However, individual group analyses revealed that the
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two parent interaction groups had significantly higher post-test than pre-test scores (dialogic questioning: t(19) = 2.15, p = .045, d = 0.99; directed attention: t(20) = 3.40, p = .003, d = 1.52). The scores of children in the other groups had not significantly improved (dialogic actress: t(19) = 1.93, p = .068, d = 0.86, regular video group: t(19) = 0.48, p = .638, d = 0.22). One reason why standard vocabulary improvement was easier to detect than differences by condition is the overall variability in EOW-PVT scores, which was larger than the mean group differences. The relatively short duration of our intervention and small sample size (compared to earlier dialogic reading studies) did not provide sufficient power to detect the small effect of condition on this standardized vocabulary measure. Discussion Over the course of a month, the 3-year-old participants in this study learned from video in all conditions. However, parent questioning helped children to learn more from the video storybooks than children did who watched without this active mediation. We hypothesized that parent-child discussion would improve children’s story comprehension. Children in the dialogic questioning group understood more about a video story than children who watched “as usual.” Children with parents trained in dialogic questioning techniques also outscored those in the control group on the vocabulary test using still images from the videos to elicit the new words, just as children’s vocabulary improved following dialogic reading with storybooks (Aram, 2006; Hargrave & Sénéchal, 2000; Wasik & Bond, 2001; Whitehurst, Arnold, et al., 1994). The relative success of the dialogic questioning group compared to the other three groups cannot solely be based on time spent with the stories. Children in the directed attention group (whose parents also paused the videos to direct their attention to the stories) were exposed to the videos significantly longer than children in the “watch as usual” control group, but did not show
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any more improvement in story comprehension and vocabulary growth. Therefore, it seems that what parents did during active mediation mattered to children’s learning more than the additional time spent with the paused video. All three of the proposed mechanisms (attention, cognitive, and social feedback) may have played a role in the success of dialogic questioning. First, parents in this group directed children’s attention and made requests that they believed would improve children’s understanding of the program content and vocabulary. Dialogic questioning may have supported cognitive processing in multiple ways. Wh- prompts (“Why”? “When”?) push children to think about the causal structure of events and give them a clearer context in which to understand story characters’ feelings and actions (Strasser et al., in press). Distancing prompts ground new stories in prior experience, which helps children integrate new knowledge with information from longterm memory. Additionally, as Strasser and colleagues have suggested, learning new vocabulary words used in the story supports comprehension. While watching one of the video stories in the lab, parents and children engaging in dialogic questioning used the target vocabulary words significantly more often than other families did. Thus, children in the dialogic questioning group had more opportunity to connect the words to the images. Finally, parents’ feedback and contingent responding helped children interpret the video stories and to accept them as a worthy of joint attention and interest (social feedback mechanism). Parents and children apparently found pausing and prompting to be mutually engaging, as parents in this group paused more than they were instructed to do so. Results from the other two conditions help clarify the role of the proposed mechanisms in active mediation. Children in the dialogic questioning group outscored those in the directed attention group on story comprehension and on the vocabulary test using screenshots. Parent
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scaffolding in the directed attention (no questioning) condition was designed to give children the hypothesized benefits of the social feedback and attention mechanisms, but less chance to benefit from the cognitive mechanism. Although parents in the directed attention condition could have elaborated on the stories and used the unfamiliar vocabulary words, parents trained in the dialogic questioning techniques paused more often and used more vocabulary words, in addition to asking questions about cause/effect relations in the stories. In contrast, parents in the directed attention group paused the video and pointed out objects on screen, but (by design) did not ask questions, so their children had fewer chances to encode and retrieve contextual relations and vocabulary words in the stories. However, both groups of children received social feedback and support from their parents, who watched with them and modeled attention to the videos. The relatively small amount of vocabulary improvement and poor story comprehension by children in the directed attention group (despite the fact that their parents co-viewed and engaged in active mediation) indicates that social support is not the only mechanism important to children’s learning from co-viewing. This result highlights the importance of the cognitive benefits of dialogic questioning techniques. To further disentangle the effects of our three proposed mechanisms, the dialogic actress group received no benefit of social feedback, because the actress on the pre-taped video could not respond to the viewing child. She questioned children less than the dialogic parents did, because they tended to follow up whatever children said in response to their initial question with additional questions tailored to the child’s level of knowledge. In story comprehension and the use of new vocabulary to identify target objects, the mean scores of children in the dialogic actress group were lower than those who received direct parental questioning, and higher than the no-intervention control group, but these differences were not significant. Our small sample
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size clearly limited our ability to detect learning differences between the dialogic actress group and the other conditions. The behavior of the actress was designed to give children the cognitive benefits of the dialogic questioning style and to draw children’s attention to important aspects of the story. Both of these factors may have increased children’s engagement with the video stories. Also, to maximize the possibility of capturing children’s learning from a person on video, some of Miss Sue’s questions were designed to elicit target words from the children, and two were story comprehension questions. Children in this group did not have the benefit of an active social partner watching the videos along with them (as children in the directed attention group did) yet their scores as a group were higher. This pattern of results indicates the importance of questioning and eliciting children’s responses to promote learning, and supports Smeets and Bus’s (2012) finding that inserting questions into electronic books increased children’s expressive vocabulary scores. It suggests that the inclusion of a person using dialogic questioning within educational videos, although not as effective as true social contingency, might be useful in increasing what young children learn. Our dialogic actress “adapted” her scaffolding by asking easier questions for the first week and more challenging ones for the second week for each set of stories. This method was effective in engaging children—all 20 were responsive to Miss Sue’s questions, responding to her prompts with approximately the same proportion of utterances as children did to parents’ dialogic questioning prompts. The parents spontaneously prompted more often than they were told to, engendering more talk about the target words. If a dialogic actress offered more prompts, children’s learning might be enhanced. More research is needed with a larger and more diverse sample, but these results hold promise for the design of effective educational videos.
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Children in all groups showed similar, small gains on the vocabulary test using novel drawings of the target objects, different from those in the videos, to elicit the words. This result suggests that the children’s knowledge of the new words was not robust and transferable. Distancing prompts that dialogic questioners offered (relating the story to the child’s life) could have directed children to compare the video pictures to other instances of the targets; however, the chance that parents used such prompts for those story items is relatively low. Only 9.0% of prompts listed in dialogic parents’ diaries (6.0% across all groups) were distancing prompts. During the final lab visit, even fewer of these kinds of prompts were offered (5.42% for the dialogic questioners and 1.39% for the overall sample). The item on the screen likely was the only referent children had for the target word. Therefore, it is not surprising that they had difficulty generalizing the new word to another context. This result is a reminder of the challenge preschool-aged children face in applying information from video to new contexts. It echoes Roseberry and colleagues’ (2009) finding that, although 3-year-olds learned a new word from video, they did not pass a stringent test of word learning, as they would easily do at this age when learning from real objects and events. On the standardized expressive vocabulary test (EOW-PVT), there were two results of interest. First, during the course of the study, there were significant improvements only in the scores of the two parent-interaction groups (dialogic questioning and directed attention). Because parents in these groups paused the videos to converse, their children may have become more comfortable responding to adults in general (including the experimenters), compared to children in the other groups. Increased confidence in speaking may have helped the children to say words aloud during the EOW-PVT post-test that they were hesitant to say during the pre-test.
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Children’s post-test standardized scores did not differ across groups on this general vocabulary measure. Previous dialogic reading studies in which such gains were found lasted as long as a school year, included teachers as well as parents, and/or involved a larger sample (Arnold, Lonigan, Whitehurst, & Epstein, 1994; Hargrave & Sénéchal, 2000; Lonigan & Whitehurst, 1998; Wasik et al., 2006; Whitehurst et al, 1988; Whitehurst et al., 1999; Whitehurst, Arnold, et al., 1994). In the one study with a similar duration, method of implementation, and sample size in which there was a significant effect of condition, researchers did not control for pre-test condition differences in vocabulary scores (Whitehurst et al., 1988). Few words from the EOW-PVT were included in our video stories. Any effects of parental mediation on general vocabulary growth are unlikely to have been through enhancing children’s learning from videos. One possible growth mechanism would be if parents began to use dialogic questioning techniques in other aspects of life (such as storybook reading, or when talking about daily events). In fact, 89% of the parents in the dialogic questioning group indicated on their exit questionnaire that they had noticed themselves using this kind of questioning while reading storybooks, and 90% indicated they used questioning during other activities. Thus, gains on a standardized vocabulary measure could continue to be realized months to years after parent training. On story comprehension and story vocabulary, children showed some learning even in the conditions without parental support, in line with previous research indicating that preschoolers can learn, especially over time, from age-appropriate television programming (Anderson et al., 2000; Ball & Bogatz, 1970; Bogatz & Ball, 1971; Diaz-Guerrero & Holtzman, 1974; Huston, Anderson, Wright, Linebarger, & Schmitt, 2001; Rice, Huston, Truglio, & Wright, 1990; Wright & Huston, 1995; Zill, 2001). However, the current study also shows that
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for very young children, learning from video alone may not be optimal. In most of the research listed above, children were not randomly assigned to view target programs, leaving open the possibility that other factors, including parental interaction, played a role in children’s learning. In a number of other studies, children have failed to learn from television (e.g., Anderson et al., 2000; Bryant et al., 1999; Crawley et al., 2002; Giles & Boyer-Pennington, 2009). The strong effect of parental interaction in the current study supports anecdotal claims of Ball and Bogatz (1970), who noted that children whose mothers talked to them about Sesame Street learned more, and Singer and Singer (1998), who believed that teacher mediation promoted effective learning from Barney & Friends. Reiser and colleagues (1984; 1988) showed that adult questioning during Sesame Street improved letter and number learning. The findings also fit well with Singer and Singer’s (1998) claim that a person on TV can serve as an effective teacher by pointing, labeling, and explaining as a parent would. The research reported here has important implications for parents, educators, and designers of educational media. Adults need to know that preschoolers learn more from video when adults scaffold their learning by discussing the story and asking children questions. Videos are often thought of either as a negative influence or as a transparent, easy medium requiring little effort for learning. Instead, parents might think of videos as analogous to storybooks, realizing that they can use videos to create learning experiences for their children. Such experiences are most beneficial when parents are active, thoughtful participants. In fact, learning to use active mediation with videos may be especially advantageous because parents do not spontaneously pause and discuss videos with their children. The parents in our control group never paused the storybook video while co-viewing with their children in the lab, and prompted on average only 3 times (vs. 54 times for the dialogic questioning group).
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In contrast, for many parents, it is a cultural norm to ask questions and have conversations while reading with their children (Gelman et al., 1998). Future research could compare the added benefit of training parents to use dialogic techniques with videos versus storybooks. Because dialogic techniques are effective with both books and videos, they may constitute a general teaching method parents and educators could use outside the context of stories. Social interaction that includes questions and feedback tailored to a preschool child’s prior knowledge appears important for learning. Explicitly training parents and teachers with mnemonics such as P-E-E-R, and the C-R-O-W-D progression of question complexity, might help them apply the techniques in other aspects of daily life, as happened with parents our study. One important limitation of our sample is that parents reported relatively high incomes and levels of education. The children all had normal to high vocabulary levels for their age. However, dialogic reading research has shown that the techniques benefit low-income children and those with language delays. We expect that training parents of children in these risk groups may provide even more opportunity for growth in learning from video. Finally, the current research is relevant for those designing educational media. One practical consideration is how to fit dialogic questioning during video watching into the lives of families. Videos serve a different function than books for both parents and teachers. Teachers have reported that, although they are specifically encouraged to incorporate reading into the curriculum, videos typically are used as filler or transitional activities (Jordan, 2005). Adults tend to think of video watching as a “time out” that gives them a chance to breathe (and get necessary chores done) while the video keeps children occupied, rather than an activity requiring their participation. Another concern is that all adults are not effective questioners. For example, adults who have not been trained in dialogic techniques tend to use few open-ended questions
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(Briesch et al., 2008; Wasik et al., 2006). The children who experienced the “interaction” provided by a dialogic questioner on video learned almost as well as those whose parents were trained to pause and question. Parents also reported that they and their children enjoyed the stories that incorporated the actress’ questions. These result suggests that an on-screen questioner (who begins with easy questions and offers challenging questions on later viewings) could be a valuable addition to children’s media. Fortunately (and no surprise to parents), research with programs such as Blue’s Clues confirms that young children like to watch the same videos repeatedly (Anderson, 2004). In the current study, children learned the most when they experienced dialogic questioning – social conversation with their parents – throughout video viewing. Children who observed an on-screen actress asking similar questions also learned from video stories. Because preschoolers enjoy watching videos, this medium can be an important tool for educators. Given that questioning by an on-screen actress is effective, dialogic techniques can be incorporated into future educational videos and other media designed for preschoolers. For many parents, it is not practical to be engaged with their child every time he or she watches a video. Thus, even though videos may not be as effective a teaching tool alone as they are with parental mediation, a welldesigned video may still offer educational benefits.
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Anderson, D. R. (2004). Nickelodeon nation: The history, politics, and economics of America’s only TV channel for kids. New York: New York University Press. Anderson, D. R., Bryant, J., Wilder, A., Santomero, A., Williams, M., & Crawley, A. M. (2000). Researching Blue's Clues: Viewing behavior and impact. Media Psychology, 2, 179-194. doi: 10.1207/S1532785XMEP0202_4 Anderson, D. R., & Pempek, T. A. (2005). Television and very young children. American Behavioral Scientist, 48, 505-522. doi: 10.1177/0002764204271506 Aram, D. (2006). Early literacy interventions: The relative roles of storybook reading, alphabetic activities, and their combination. Reading and Writing, 19, 489-515. doi: 10.1016/S01636383(00)00013-8 Ard, L. M., & Beverly, B. L. (2004). Preschool word learning during joint book reading: Effect of adult questions and comments. Communication Disorders Quarterly, 26, 17-28. doi: 10.1177/15257401040260010101 Arnold, D. H., Lonigan, C. J., Whitehurst, G. J., & Epstein, J. N. (1994). Accelerating language development through picture book reading: Replication and extension to a videotape training format. Journal of Education Psychology, 86, 235-243. doi: 10.1037/00220663.86.2.235 Baldwin, D. A. (1991). Infants' contribution to the achievement of joint reference. Child Development, 62, 875-890. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1991.tb01577.x Ball, S., & Bogatz, G. A. (1970). A summary of the major findings in "The first year of Sesame Street: An evaluation." Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.
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years later. Lawrence, KS: Center for Research on the Influences of Television on Children. Zill, N. (2001). Does Sesame Street enhance school readiness?: Evidence from a national survey of children. In S. M. Fisch & R. T. Truglio (Eds.), "G" is for growing (pp. 115-130). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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Table 1 Three Proposed Mechanisms of Improved Learning Across Conditions Attention
Cognitive
Social Feedback
High: Parent directs
High: Points out/
High: Responds
child’s attention to on-
rehearses information
contingently, relates
screen events (with
with child, gives context
program to child’s
understanding of
for encoding, and
experiences, corrects
child’s knowledge)
retrieval practice
child’s interpretations
High: Parent directs
Low: Points out
Medium/High: Some
child’s attention to on-
information; child must
contingency through
screen events (with
interpret and encode
pausing and
understanding of
information, not asked to
commenting, but does
child’s knowledge)
retrieve
not correct or question
Medium/High: Actress
Medium/High: Points
directs child’s
out/ rehearses
Low: Cannot relate
Dialogic
attention to on-screen
information with child,
information to child’s
Actress
events (no
retrieval practice, no
experiences or correct
understanding of
child-specific context for
child’s responses
child’s knowledge)
encoding
Dialogic Questioning
Directed Attention
Low: Child is left to Regular
Low: Child’s attention
Video
is not directed
Low: Child receives no interpret and encode feedback or interaction information on own
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Table 2 Children’s Scores on the Story Comprehension Measure
Condition
Comprehension score (of 10) Mean (SD)
Dialogic Questioning
8.20 (1.32)
Directed Attention
6.86* (1.82)
Dialogic Actress
7.13 (1.69)
Regular Video
6.40** (2.42)
Note. Asterisks indicate a significant difference from the dialogic questioning group scores by planned comparisons. *
p < .05. **p < .01.
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Table 3 Children’s Scores on the Vocabulary Measures
Condition
Story-Specific Screenshots (of 14) Mean (SD)
Story-Specific Drawings (of 14) Mean (SD)
EOW-PVT Standard Score Mean (SD)
1.00 (1.08) 7.40*** (2.50)
1.55 (1.19) 3.68*** (2.41)
106.90 (11.53) 110.70* (14.32)
1.14 (1.32) 5.76 a,***(2.17)
1.24 (1.09) 3.43*** (1.72)
108.48 (10.97) 113.48* (12.52)
1.05 (1.05) *** (2.72) 6.35
1.05 (1.19) *** 3.15 (2.72)
109.00 (13.23) 112.70 (17.00)
0.70 (1.08) 5.50 a,***(2.44)
1.35 (1.39) 3.55*** (1.91)
108.90 (14.63) 110.15 (16.71)
Dialogic Questioning Pre-test Post-test Directed Attention Pre-test Post-test Dialogic Actress Pre-test Post-test Regular Video Pre-test Post-test
Note. Letter superscripts indicate significant differences in scores from the dialogic questioning group at post-test by planned comparison. Asterisks indicate significant pre- to post-test change in a repeated measures t-test. a p < .05. * p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.
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Table 4 Children’s Improvement on Vocabulary Words from “Bear Snores On” Proportion of children
Frequency in story
Average times used during viewing
Den (cave, lair)
Medium
2.09
.22
.83
.60
Badger
Medium
1.23
.01
.47
.46
Twigs
Low
.40
.01
.26
.25
Stew
Low
.39
.00
.07
.07
Word
Knew the word Knew the word at pre-test at post-test
Learned the word
Note. The third column indicates the number of times the word was used by the child, parent, or sibling during the in-lab viewing of the video. Children were counted as having learned a word if they produced it at post-test but not at pre-test.
DIALOGIC VIDEO Figure 1. Examples of Story Screenshots and Drawings
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