Personalized interactive characters for toddlers' learning of seriation from a video presentation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2014.03.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Personalized interactive media characters can increase toddlers' learning of seriation skills.

  • Toddlers with stronger relationships with media characters learn the most content from video demonstrations by the characters.

  • Parasocial relationships can develop when toddlers play with interactive media characters.

  • Parents can aid toddlers in building relationships with interactive characters during play.

Abstract

Children's media is rooted in relationships with onscreen characters. In this study, 18-month-old toddlers were initially exposed to one of two unfamiliar interactive media characters for 3 months. Conditions varied whether the character was personalized to them or not. At age 21 months, toddlers were tested on a seriation task that was presented onscreen by the character and compared to the performance of a 21-month-old control group who did not view a video demonstration (total N = 48). Toddlers learned significantly more from the personalized character, but not from the non-personalized character, when compared to the control group. Children in the personalized condition also increased in parasocial, nurturing behaviors directed at the character during play sessions, and these scores were linked to better seriation performance. The results suggest an important role for social relationships with interactive characters to teach early seriation skills.

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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