Designing and using digital books for learning: The informative case of young children and video
Section snippets
Learning from video: not easy for young viewers
To adults, watching sports or a current event on video is much like really being there [8]. We can learn to make a gourmet dish from watching a cooking show or improve our golf swing via an instructional video. What we see on the screen, we can apply in the real world; that is, adults can transfer what they learn from a representation to their own lives [9]. The connection between video and the real world may seem so obvious, we lose sight of the fact that videos (and still pictures) are
Experiences that promote learning
Thinking about the experience that young children have with video, it may not be so strange that they do not reliably use it as an information source. On the screen, animals talk and wear clothes, and objects violate the law of gravity—in other words, the world on the screen does not reflect the aspects of real life that infants are beginning to form concepts about [39]. For this reason, the youngest viewers may be conservative about learning from video [40]. If this is so, giving children
Social support increases attentiveness and learning
The previous paragraph alludes to another important factor that helps young viewers learn from video: social support. Even simple scaffolds by adults can support learning: 2-year-olds learned a new word from a video when their parents provided two one-sentence scaffolds linking the objects on screen with the real objects in the room [26]. Children who watched without parent support showed no evidence of applying the label to the objects.
Three possible mechanisms through which parent
Repetition of content
Besides helpful external supports from people and the environment, some support for learning can be built into the digital product itself. Since representations such as video images (or pictures on touchscreens) are 2-dimensional and difficult for children to connect to the real world, young children may need longer to process the information. Brain-imaging research with event-related potentials (ERPs) indicates that during the attention process, toddlers (18-month-olds) recognize a
Parasocial relationships
One effect of children’s repeated exposure to educational programming has been the development of what are called parasocial relationships: “emotionally tinged relationships with media characters that parallel real social relationships” [54, p. 1]. According to the research of Calvert and her colleagues, these enduring attachments stem from repeated interactions with a media character that acts social by asking questions and pausing for a response, along with parent encouragement and
Contingent responsiveness
True responsiveness with an on-screen person is possible when using a recently developed technology: video chat. Children between 1 and 5 years of age played and interacted with their parent on a video feed in the same way they did when the parent was physically present and seemed to draw comfort from their parent’s “presence” via video feed [58], [59]. In other research, children learned better from video when a researcher on screen offered live, contingent responses (e.g., played “Simon
Attention-directing versus attention-distracting features
As interactivity is built into e-books, giving thought to the kind of interactivity is vital. According to previous research, the enhancements included in an e-book may determine the extent to which it promotes or distracts from learning. Research with video has shown that preschool children orient their attention to the screen following sound effects and character vocalizations [64]. Placing attention-grabbing auditory features just before important content helped 4-year-olds attend to and
Conclusion
For very young children, learning from digital media holds both challenges and promise. Research indicates that young children sometimes find it difficult to learn from video and touchscreens. Experiences that clarify the relation between screen and reality, social scaffolding, repetition of content, encouraging parasocial relationships, contingent responsiveness from individuals on the screen, and attention-directing audio and video features all support learning.
Built-in supports and those
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