Poster #12 - "I Don't Understand": Bolstering Children's Requests for Clarification in an Interview Setting

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Attention, Learning, Memory

Integrative Statement

When children are interviewed in formal contexts (e.g., medical, legal), it is crucial that they indicate when they do not understand a question or require clarification. Furthermore, understanding how and when children request clarification to adults’ questions informs our theoretical understanding of children’s metacognition and comprehension monitoring. Research demonstrates that children rarely request clarification or say “don’t know” in response to questions and that older children do so more than younger children (Malloy et al., 2015; Saywitz et al., 1999; Waterman et al., 2000).

It remains unknown whether children fail to request clarification because (1) they do not realize that they need it (i.e., poor comprehension monitoring), (2) they do not feel comfortable doing so, or (3) because they do not know how. The goals of the current study are to test brief interventions designed to encourage children to request clarification when appropriate, and to advance knowledge concerning children’s metacognition.

Method
96 4- to 9-year-olds (M=6.22, SD=1.66, 56% female), engaged in a brief, staged demonstration individually and were then interviewed about it by an unfamiliar adult. (Prior to SRCD, data from an additional 24 children will be collected).

Children were randomly assigned to an Instruction condition: (1) control (standard instructions informing children that they can say “I don’t understand”), (2) Comprehension Monitoring vignette, or (3) Reassurance vignette, and a Stop condition: (1) the Stop method in which children were taught to raise their hand like a police officer and say, “Stop! I don’t understand!” in response to difficult questions, or (2) control (i.e., no Stop method).

Children were asked 22 questions, 8 of which required clarification (Table 1). Children’s responses to the “tricky” questions were coded for whether and how children requested clarification (Table 2). A key dependent measure was whether children requested clarification (0=no, 1=yes).

Results and Discussion
Preliminary analyses indicated that 83.3% (n=80) of children requested clarification at least once (M=3.89, SD=2.64, range=0 to 8) with 10.4% (n=10) requesting clarification in response to all of the tricky questions and 16.7% (n=16) to none.

A logistic regression examined the effects of Age, Instructions, and Stop on the dichotomous outcome variable. The model was significant, χ2(4)=37.85, p<.001, correctly classifying 86.5% of the cases. Results revealed a significant main effect of Age and a marginal main effect of Instructions. For every one-year increase in age, there was a 1.64 increase in the log odds of children requesting clarification. There was a trend for children in the comprehension monitoring condition (97%) to be more likely to request clarification than children in the control condition (74%) who did not differ significantly from the reassurance condition (79%).

These preliminary results suggest that, in a brief intervention delivered via vignettes, reassuring children that it is socially acceptable to request clarification is not as effective as demonstrating successful comprehension monitoring. With the full sample of 120, additional analyses will focus on the number and types of clarification requests made. Data collection is ongoing at a popular local children’s museum and will be complete by October, 2018.

Authors

• Lillian Rodriguez-Steen, University of Ontario Institute of Technology
  Presenting Author

• Taylor G. Jones, University of Ontario Institute of Technology
  Non-Presenting Author

• Flavia Koncz, University of Ontario Institute of Technology
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lindsay C Malloy, University of Ontario Institute of Technology
  Non-Presenting Author