Personalized interactive characters for toddlers' learning of seriation from a video presentation
Section snippets
Early seriation learning
U.S. children lag behind most of their international peers in learning STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) concepts, which places the U.S. at a future economic disadvantage in the world economy (U.S. Department of Education, 2011). One way to address this deficiency is to get young children involved in activities that promote the early skills required to understand more advanced mathematical concepts. Seriation is one such skill (Gola et al., 2013, Kirova and Bhargava, 2002
Participants
The sample consisted of 48 toddlers, equally distributed by gender. Children were recruited from a database of more than 700 children living in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Parents were initially contacted by phone or email and asked if their child had any prior experience with the characters Scout and Violet distributed by LeapFrog Enterprises. Those whose children did not know the characters were randomly assigned to one of two treatment groups: a personalized interactive character
Descriptive statistics
Table 1 presents the means and standard deviations for children's seriation scores, CDI scores, prior cup-nesting experience, and attention to the cup-nesting video demonstration. A 2 (condition) × 2 (gender) ANOVA with visual attention to the video demonstration as the dependent variable revealed that there were no significant differences in attention between conditions, p's > .05. Children in the no-exposure control group did have significantly higher CDI scores than those in the personalized
Discussion
The purpose of this study was to examine the role that personalized interactive characters play in the development of toddlers' relationships with those characters as well as their learning of subsequent cognitive tasks, in this case a seriation task presented on a video. The results suggest that interactive media characters can improve early seriation learning when they are programmed to be similar and responsive to a child. In particular, toddlers who played with interactive toy characters
Acknowledgments
We thank the parents and children who participated in this research and our research team at the Children's Digital Media Center, including Dr. Bradley Bond, Elisabeth McClure, Alessandra Caruso, Maggie Girard, Elizabeth Seaman, Brian Borromeo, Jacqueline Pasulka, Krista Engemann, Daniel Galloway, Barrie Adleberg, Jenniffer Torres Ortega, and Katie Poplawski, for their assistance in conducting this study. We would also like to thank Dr. Rusan Chen for his assistance with statistical analyses
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