Designing an app to support low-SES preschoolers’ vocabulary learning using science of learning principles

• In Event: 2-053 - Connecting Development to Mobile Preschool App Design and Use

Integrative Statement

Children need sizeable vocabularies to profit from hearing storybooks and reading themselves (Dickinson & Porche, 2011). Very few apps that are marketed as "educational" report any benchmarks of educational quality (Vaala, Ly, & Levine, 2015) despite the fact that between 2013 and 2017, the average amount of time children under 8 spent using mobile devices tripled (Common Sense Media, 2017). But can children learn vocabulary from digital apps? We partnered with an educational technology company, SmartyPal, to create a digital app supporting vocabulary. Game design was based on principles from the Science of Learning (Hirsh-Pasek, Zosh, et al., 2015). Ten words were presented in a meaningful, narrative context that encouraged active engagement by having children use their knowledge of word meanings to move the game forward.

In Study 1, middle-SES 4-year-olds played the game once in the lab and completed a receptive vocabulary test. Children picked the picture for each word from four choices, none of which were identical to the game images. Foil selection included thematic (found in same event), conceptual (common category), and phonological (similar sound) foils, creating a stringent test of word learning as children were required to generalize beyond the game and choose between meaningfully-related options. Preliminary findings (N= 18) show that children who played the game answered more vocabulary questions correctly (M= 6.3 out of 10, SD= 2.3) than control group children who did not play the game (M = 2.8, SD= .84), t(15) = 4.5, p< .001,d= 2.2.
In Study 2, low-SES 3- and 4-year-olds (N= 33) played the game four times over four weeks as part of a larger storybook- and play-based intervention. The following week, children's receptive and expressive vocabulary learning was tested. Although there was not a significant gain on the receptive test, children's expressive knowledge showed significant gains from pre-test (M= .11, SD = .35) to post-test (M= .94, SD = 1.8), t(31) = 2.68, p= .01, d = .65. The difference between pre- and post-test scores was significantly greater for target words than for five control words that children were not exposed to, t(31) = 2.63, p= .01, d= .65.

In Study 3, we compare one classroom of children playing the game as in Study 2 with a control group in which teachers were given storybooks along with a list of vocabulary words and child-friendly definitions and were instructed to read the book four times over four weeks to align with the experimental group's four game plays. Results from Study 3 are forthcoming and will be included in the symposium presentation.

Our results indicate that both middle-to-high-SES children in a lab setting and low-SES children in a classroom setting learned new vocabulary from an interactive tablet game. These findings suggest that digital games show promise for vocabulary learning.

Authors

• Rebecca Dore, The Ohio State University
  Presenting Author

• Marcia Shirilla, University of Delaware
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tara Saunders, University of Delaware
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lindsey Foster, University of Delaware
  Non-Presenting Author

• Emily Hopkins, University of Scranton
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tamara Spiewak Toub, Temple University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Molly Collins, Vanderbilt University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jacob Lev Schatz, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Molly Scott, Temple University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jessica R Lawson-Adams, Vanderbilt University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Elizabeth Burke Hadley, University of South Florida
  Non-Presenting Author

• Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Univ of DE
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Temple University
  Non-Presenting Author

• David K Dickinson, Vanderbilt University
  Non-Presenting Author