3-022 - Fostering Teachers’ Skill in Supporting Inferential Thinking in Preschool

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Listening comprehension, oral vocabulary, and discourse facility are critical to reading comprehension. Measures of these skills at the end of preschool are strong predictors of reading comprehension by the end of third grade and beyond (Dickinson, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2010). Inferential thinking is also predictive of later reading comprehension (Cain & Oakhill, 2012). Research on teacher-child interactions in story reading and other literacy contexts indicates that higher quality instruction (i.e., more conceptual and inferential) is associated with better literacy outcomes in young children (Hamre & Pianta, 2005); however, many comprehensive efforts to improve the quality of teacher language in classrooms have fallen short and there is great need to understand mechanisms for improving children’s inferential thinking in the early years.

This symposium reports findings from three interventions designed to increase preschool teachers’ capacities for supporting young children’s inferential thinking during read alouds. The first paper lays a foundation for relationships among early language, cognitive, and motivational factors associated with children’s narrative comprehension and reports findings from a study to train teachers and parents to support children’s higher-level thinking. The second describes outcomes of teachers’ participation in vocabulary and comprehension training during book reading and play contexts on children’s inferential comprehension. The third examines teachers’ growth in inferential talk and the generalizability of their learning from the intervention to books beyond the project. The symposium offers compelling evidence from behavioral science for the promise of innovative interventions that improve teachers’ support for inferential thinking in our youngest learners.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chair

• Molly F Collins, Vanderbilt University

Discussant

• David Dickinson, Vanderbilt University

Individual Presentations

• Tracking and Supporting the Development of Early Narrative Comprehension Skills - Presenting Author: Janne Lepola, University of Turku

• Effects of a Book Reading and Play Intervention on Children’s Story Comprehension - Presenting Author: Molly F Collins, Vanderbilt University; Kimberly Turner Nesbitt, University of New Hampshire; bretta l rivera, Vanderbilt University; Tamara Spiewak Toub, Temple University; Joan Ganz Cooney Center; Brenna Hassinger-Das, Temple University; katherine Newman, Vanderbilt University; Hande ILGAZ, Bilkent University; Elizabeth Burke Hadley, Vanderbilt University; Ageliki Nicolopoulou, Lehigh University; David Dickinson, Vanderbilt University; Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Temple University; Roberta Golinkoff, University of Delaware

• Does Teachers’ Learning During a Scripted Intervention to Support Preschoolers’ Inferential Thinking Generalize to New Texts? - Presenting Author: Cynthia Vu, Vanderbilt University; Molly F Collins, Vanderbilt University; Bethany Gleason, Vanderbilt University; Kimberly Turner Nesbitt, University of New Hampshire