Hands-On and Minds-On Play: Kindergarteners' Buddy Reading on iPads

• In Event: 14.034 - Exploring Young Children's Experiences With Multimodal Text

Abstract

When children approach an activity as play, they show increased motivation and engagement, more purposeful problem solving, higher levels of meta-cognition and self-regulation, and increased overall performance (Mclnnes et al., 2011; Whitebread, 2010). Therefore, it is important to understand how children’s play is related to their reading of multimodal text, such as iPad app books. However, despite the increasing use of iPads in early childhood (Common Sense Media, 2011), we only have limited understanding about how children engage in play with these devices/apps because such experiences are often not viewed as play, or are viewed as mindless play. To address these issues, we investigate (1) What forms of play do kindergarteners engage with while reading multimodal text with peers? and (2) How are these forms of play related to their reading on iPads?

This study is informed by views of children’s (a) learning as both social and cultural, involving interactions with others and cultural artifacts including technology and text (Bakhtin, 1981; Holland et al., 1998; Vygotsky, 1978), (b) literacies as situated and meaningful ways in which people produce, transform and make sense of the world through multiple ‘modes’ of communication, such as gesture, gaze, body movement, words, sign, and symbols (Jewitt and Kress, 2003; Kress, 2010;), and (c) play as symbolic, meaningful, active, pleasurable, voluntary and intrinsically motivated, rule-governed, and episodic activities (Fromberg, 1999; Nicolopoulou, 1993).

Twenty-five kindergarteners (ages 5-6) with diverse backgrounds engaged in the following video-recorded sessions across each of 12 weeks: an iPad app book whole-class interactive read-aloud (modeling), two 10-minute buddy-reading sessions (practice), and one individual reading (testing). Emerging coding and constant comparison (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) were used to analyze all 362 buddy-reading sessions to identify forms of play, engagement levels, and reading discussions.

We found that children engaged with both hands-on and minds-on forms of play. For example, a pair of buddies was reading X is for X-ray. The boy asked his partner, “What is inside a hand?” (minds-on) His partner eagerly answered, “Let me show you” and used her finger to swipe the hotspot to show the bones inside of a hand (hands-on).

Play occurred with several objects (a) iPads as objects (e.g., as a umbrella to pretend rain is coming), (b) digital text (e.g., touching text quickly to make it read fast), (c) hotspots (e.g., weaving a finger on the screen to rock a boat; this was the most dominant form of play), (d) their buddies (e.g., speaking like a character in the story to each other), and (e) words/language (e.g., after reading the book Toucan Toucan’t, one boy observed other two classmates fighting to close their iPad and said “Toucan’t close an iPad”).

Some forms of play were associated with certain learning outcomes—e.g., playing with hotspots is associated with learning about how to read digital-texts, discussing the story with a buddy is related to better comprehension. These findings suggest ways to guide children’s play on iPad to promote more productive reading with multimodal text.

Authors

• X. Christine Wang, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Tanya M. Christ, Oakland University