Impacts on Oral Language of an Intervention Synthesizing Early Mathematics and Make-Believe Play

• In Event: Efficacy of an Intervention Synthesizing Scaffolding Designed to Promote Self-Regulation With an Early Mathematics Curriculum

Abstract

Research suggests that both early mathematics interventions (Sarama, Lange, Clements, & Wolfe, 2012) and play-based interventions designed to promote self-regulation (Bodrova & Leong, 2007) can have positive effects on oral language competencies. This project included one intervention based on the same math curriculum and another based on the synthesis of these two interventions.

In one instantiation of the math intervention, results showed no evidence that children who were taught mathematics using the curriculum performed differently than control children who received the typical district mathematics instruction on two of the oral language (story retell) subtests, sentence length and inferential reasoning (emotive content). However, children in the math group outperformed children in the control group on four oral language subtests: ability to recall key words (Information score), use of complex utterances (Complexity score), willingness to reproduce narratives independently (Independence score), and inferential reasoning (Sarama et al., 2012).

Although there is no direct evidence on oral language, the use of specific pedagogical strategies that optimize make-believe play have been proven successful in improving young children’s self-regulation competencies and academic achievement (e.g., Bodrova & Leong, 2005). Based on these studies, we assessed the relative effects of the three treatments on children’s expressive language skills.

We chose to use The Renfrew Bus Story - North American Edition (RBS, Glasgow & Cowley, 1994), a standardized measure of oral language using narrative retell, to evaluate children’s oral language. The assessment involves telling a child a story, and then asking the child to retell the story using the pictures in the wordless storybook as prompts. At the end of the story, assessors asked children two inferential questions. We assessed oral language in the context of a story retell task because this type of assessment is an ecologically valid method of eliciting language from children as most are familiar with the requirements and procedures of storytelling; most having read stories in school or at home by an early age (Botting, 2002; Curenton, 2004; Fey, Catts, Proctor-Williams, Tomblin, & Zhang, 2004). The resultant scores from the Bus Story assessment give us indicators of aspects of a child’s oral language, such as sentence length (Sentence Length score) or complexity of utterances that are present in the child’s story retell.

As shown by preliminary results in Exhibits 1 and 2, the impacts on the Bus Story in the first post-test were negligible, but in the second follow-up, the BB group tended to outperform the other two research groups (BBSR and Control group) although not with statistical significance. Once pretests have been included in the models, we will be able to see whether these results mirror those found in previous research on Building Blocks (Sarama et al., 2012), but they have not confirmed Bodrova and Leong’s hypothesis of SSR’s impacts on expressive language. The paper will discuss possible reasons why BB would be effective in this domain while BBSR was not, and we will present implications for practitioners and policymakers of introducing multiple initiatives simultaneously.

Authors

• Alissa Anne Lange, Rutgers University

• Carolyn J. Layzer, Abt Associates Inc.

• Julie Sarama, University of Denver

• Douglas H. Clements, University of Denver

• Fatih Unlu, Abt Associates Inc.