Helping Young Children Learn Informational Text: The Role of Digital Media

• In Event: Young Children's Learning from Educational Media

Abstract

Informational text (IT) —resources whose purpose is to inform—is essential to daily life and fundamental to literacy, as children use it to learn content and adults rely on it to function in the world. However, opportunities to encounter IT are generally lacking for young children, compared to narrative stories (Duke, 2000; Yopp & Yopp, 2012). Educational media can help fill this gap by reaching children at home, and public media in particular can help parents explore new information with their children (McClure et al., 2017; Silander et al., 2018; Troseth et al., 2006). This research focused on Molly of Denali (Molly), a PBS KIDS series designed to help children 4-8 develop IT skills through videos and digital games.

To understand whether the Molly resources impacted children’s IT skills, the research team conducted two nine-week randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with a combined total of 263 first-grade children from low-income families across the U.S. The first RCT began with in-person data collection and then, due to COVID-19, shifted to remote data collection via video conferencing. The team then conducted a fully remote replication study with a second sample. In both studies, all participants received data-enabled tablets and were randomly assigned to one of two groups: treatment or control. The treatment group received tablets pre-loaded with curated Molly resources that were grouped into content bundles focused on specific IT skills and features. Tablets for the control group blocked access to PBS KIDS and other IT apps. Researchers measured impact by developing a standardized assessment that assessed children's ability to use IT to solve real-world questions. Researchers measured expressive language ability at baseline, using the Expressive Vocabulary Test, third edition (EVT-3; Williams, 2019), as that characteristic could potentially affect performance on the ITSI.

Because recruitment criteria and intervention were identical, researchers combined data from the two studies to improve power; separate analyses for each study are substantively the same. Multiple regression analyses showed that the treatment group outperformed the control group on ability to use IT to answer questions or solve real-world problems, controlling for baseline EVT score, demographics, site, and study, b(SE) = 1.25(0.43), p = .004, g = .24. In addition, the more time children spent with Molly resources, the better they performed, b(SE) = .20(.04), p < .001. For every hour spent on Molly content, children scored .20 points higher at posttest (out of 27 possible points). These findings are particularly meaningful given our successful replication.

These findings demonstrate that the benefit of access to Molly resources on children’s IT skills likely reflects measurable learning. Although the effect sizes were modest, they were nonetheless notable for a short (nine-week) intervention in which children only interacted with the resources for about an hour a week on average. Our findings provide further evidence that digital media can support children’s learning at home, and suggest that public media can offer an inexpensive method capable of reaching children across the country with intentionally developed, high-quality digital content.

Authors

• Lucy Nelson, Education Development Center
  Presenting Author

• Alice Kaiser, EDC

• Joy Lorenzo Kennedy, Education Development Center - New York

• Claire Christensen, SRI International - District of Columbia