Say What? Evaluating the Quality of Caregiver-Child Conversations with an eBook

• In Event: 2-148 - Child Talk and Vocabulary Development: Enhancing the Educational Environment of Books and Videos

Integrative Statement

Shared book-reading between caregivers and children is one of the major contributors to early vocabulary and literacy development across all SES backgrounds (Huttenlocher et al., 2010). In “dialogic reading”, caregivers are encouraged to engage their children in a conversation using open-ended questions throughout the reading. Numerous studies across several decades clearly indicate that this method benefits young children’s vocabulary development (Whitehurst et al., 1988; Wasik et al., 2006). Although effective, training caregivers and teachers to use the various types of dialogic strategies can be difficult and time-consuming (Mol et al., 2008). To make dialogic reading more accessible, we created an e-book in which dialogic reading principles were modeled by an embedded character (Ramone). On each page of the e-book, after the story narration concludes, Ramone automatically appears and prompts the caregiver to engage with their child by offering a sample question. As the story progresses, Ramone asks increasingly challenging questions (e.g., requiring inference to answer). In a second version of the book, Ramone does not appear on every page. Caregivers have the option to get a hint from Ramone by tapping an icon, allowing them to either hear Ramone’s sample question or receive a helpful clue from him. We tested this technology with families to investigate whether use of this eBook could influence the quality of caregiver-child dialogue. To examine the quality of talk, we used Price’s coding scheme for storybook related conversation (Price et al., 2009). Parent and child content-related utterances were assigned codes representing four increasing levels of cognitively demanding conversation.

Caregivers and their 3- to 4- year old children were randomly assigned to read the storybook twice in one of four formats: experimental e-book with Ramone (the two caregiver training versions described above--N=17 dyads), basic e-book without Ramone (N=16 dyads), basic e-book without narration (N=16 dyads), and a paper version of the book (N=17 dyads). Initial analyses demonstrated that caregivers who used the experimental e-book talked significantly more (M=234.65 utterances) than those in the other 3 conditions, F(3)= 13.58, p<.001. Significantly more child talk was also found with the experimental e-book compared to the other formats (M=104.53 utterances), F(3)=21.52, p<.001). Results indicated that caregivers who used the experimental e-Book produced a higher proportion of the more advanced level 3 and 4 talk (M=34% of utterances), compared to caregivers in the other 3 conditions, F(3)= 12.71, p<.001. Likewise, children who experienced the experimental book produced higher levels of cognitively demanding talk (M=41%) than did children in the other three conditions, F(3)=18.38, p<.001. Thus, the dialogic model of questioning built in to the e-book led families to engage in more cognitively complex conversation while reading. These complex types of parent-child conversations have been related to children’s development of higher levels of complex vocabulary (Rowe, Leech, & Cabrera, 2016). This study therefore suggests that an embedded questioner in an e-book may be an effective tool to make the skills of dialogic reading accessible to caregivers, allowing more children to reap the resulting benefits in language and vocabulary development.

Authors

• Zachary Stuckelman, Vanderbilt University
  Presenting Author

• Gabrielle Strouse, University of South Dakota
  Non-Presenting Author

• Georgene Troseth, Vanderbilt University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Israel Flores, Vanderbilt University
  Non-Presenting Author