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Boys and Girls Learning from Digital Story Books
Poster Presentation, 31st World Congress of the Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics, Innovations in Supporting Communication Participation, Taipei, Taiwan, August 19 – 22, 2019
Background and Additional Details for the Poster Presentation
Introduction
Literacy is essential for adequate functioning in the modern world, especially with the ubiquity of digital technologies. At the individual level, literacy is an important determinant of mental and physical health, school completion and vocational attainment. At the society level, the literacy level of the population is associated with economic output, quality of life and social cohesion. The literacy skills of children, teenagers and adults are tracked closely around the world and gaps in literacy skills between and within countries raise alarm and calls for policy solutions. One literacy gap that is especially widespread and longstanding is the gender gap favouring girls, as reported for 15-year-old students by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, with the gap being equivalent to one year of schooling (OECD, 2015). In Quebec, Canada a gap in writing skills has been observed in the results from the province-wide literacy test administered repeatedly, starting in fourth grade and continuing through high school; this gap favouring the girls (especially in the areas of spelling, morphology and syntax) has persisted despite successful efforts to raise the mean scores overall.
Many hypotheses have been put forward to explain the disadvantage to boys with respect to the acquisition of literacy skills. We explored these different hypotheses in a series of blog posts that discuss the possibility that boys differ from girls with respect to: (1) acquisition of early language skills and (2) emergent literacy precursors; (3) executive function skills; (4) motivation to read; and/or (5) social-environmental influences. Although these hypotheses are well motivated, the research evidence remains inconsistent and inconclusive. Therefore this research program aims to further explore the issues underlying the gender gap in boys’ versus girls’ literacy acquisition in the context of French-language schools in Quebec.
Study 1
In the first study reported, the relationship between boys’ oral language and emergent literacy skills at school entry was examined in relation to their spelling abilities at the end of second grade. It was hypothesized that language and phonological awareness skills at school entry would predict spelling skills at the end of second grade. Furthermore, it was predicted that any gender differences in spelling abilities would be reflected in weaker oral language and emergent literacy skills by boys compared to girls at school entry.
Method. In Study 1 children’s oral language and emergent literacy skills were assessed with an iPad-based app that was developed specifically for the Quebec-French environment (Rvachew, Royle, et al., 2017). The app assesses speech perception, speech production accuracy, phonological awareness using a rhyme matching test, and past tense morpheme production (PHOPHLO: Prédiction des Habilités Orthographiques par des Habilités Langage Oral). At the end of second grade the children completed the BELO (Batterie d’évaluation de lecture et d’orthographe), a standardized dictation test that includes nonwords, real words and sentences (Georges & Pech-Georgel, 2006). Further information about these measures is available in previous open access papers (Kolne, Gonnerman, Marquis, Royle, & Rvachew, 2016; Rvachew, Royle, et al., 2017). The participants were 92 children (56 girls, 36 boys) who were attending a French-language kindergarten in a suburban school located in a middle-class neighborhood. In second grade, 78 children returned for follow-up assessment of their spelling abilities.
Results. The first finding was that there were no significant gender differences in performance on any of the PHOPHLO subtests as shown in Figure 1. As predicted however PHOPHLO performance was significantly associated with BELO performance in second grade. However, the boys obtained significantly worse BELO scores than the girls, despite obtaining equivalent language screen scores at the earlier time point. The advantage to girls for second grade spelling performance was seen for those that passed the PHOPHLO screen and those that failed it, as shown in Figure 2.
Study 2
The results of Study 1 suggest that gender differences in emergent literacy skills at school entry do not explain the gender gap in literacy skills that is already apparent by the end of second grade. Therefore we conducted a study to observe boys and girls literacy learning in real time, using a shared reading paradigm involving a digital book that we had previously implemented in English-language schools (Rvachew, Rees, Carolan, & Nadig, 2017).
Method
Toward the end of the kindergarten year, 10 adult readers shared a book from the iRead With series with 16 small groups of boys or 17 small groups of girls; the book was shared 3 times in a week (totalling 105 reading sessions in all) and then the children were tested to obtain measures of learning from the book at the end of the week. The shared reading transcripts were carefully examined to identify differences in the adult-child interactions when the dyad or triad of children included boys versus girls. The methods used to analyze these reading transcripts are described in a forthcoming paper along with examples from the transcripts that exemplify the boys’ and girls’ behavior during the shared reading intervention (Rvachew, Thompson Forrester, and Dey, accepted).
Results
Prior to the shared reading intervention the girls and boys in study 2 obtained similar PHOPHLO total scores. Post-tests revealed that the boy groups and girl groups learned similarly from the shared reading sessions as measured by story retell, story comprehension, phonological awareness and word recognition tasks that were linked to the book that the children experienced. We also observed that boys and girls were similarly engaged by the books, both during the shared reading interactions and during post-reading sessions in which the small groups shared the books with no adult present The similar learning outcomes for boys and girls may have occurred because the children received similar literacy inputs from the adult readers regardless of gender: that is, the adults produced the same number of comments about the story, vocabulary and print concepts, as shown in Figure 3. However, adult readers directed significantly more comments about behavior to boys compared to girls. A more detailed examination of these comments revealed that adults intervened to redirect the boys’ attention twice as often compared to the girls (a nonsignificant difference, as shown in Figure 4, left); of greater interest, the adult readers intervened to help the boys regulate their emotions and behavior three times more often compared to the girls (a significant difference, as shown in Figure 4, right).
Discussion and Conclusion
Although boys learned as well as the girls from a shared reading intervention in kindergarten, there was evidence to suggest that some boys behaved differently or that their behavior was perceived differently by the adult reader, when compared to the girls. Interventions to regulate impulsive behavior or emotional outbursts were significantly more common among boys than among girls. Our analysis suggested that these episodes might be related to specific differences in boys’ executive functions but might also be related to the social environment in which the readings occurred. More specifically, the boys may have been experiencing stereotype threat in the context of these small group interactions.
Teacher interventions to regulate boys’ emotions and behavior distract from learning because they interrupt teaching and sometimes result in exclusions (e.g., time-outs or suspensions). Repeated episodes such as these over the primary school grades may contribute to a cumulative deficit in literacy learning. Self-regulation may be the key to literacy achievement for boys over the long term.
Future work within our lab will include a particular focus on strategies that best support self-regulation in boys, specifically within a literacy learning environment so that they can maximise their language learning outcomes.
References
Georges, F., & Pech-Georgel, C. (2006). BELO – Batterie d’évaluation de lecture et d’orthographe: Éditions Solal.
Kolne, K., Gonnerman, L., Marquis, A., Royle, P., & Rvachew, S. (2016). Teacher predictions of children’s spelling ability: What are they based on and how good are they? . Language and Literacy, 18(1), 71-98. Retrieved from https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/langandlit/index.php/langandlit/article/viewFile/22994/20260
OECD. (2015). The ABC of Gender Equality in Education: Aptitude, Behavior, Confidence, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris.
Rvachew, S., Rees, K., Carolan, E., & Nadig, A. (2017). Improving emergent literacy with school-based shared reading: Paper versus ebooks. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, 12, 24-29.
Rvachew, S., Royle, P., Gonnerman, L., Stanké, B., Marquis, A., & Herbay, A. (2017). Development of a Tool to Screen Risk of Literacy Delays in French-Speaking Children: PHOPHLO. Canadian Journal of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology, 41(3), 321-340. Retrieved from https://cjslpa.ca/files/2017_CJSLPA_Vol_41/No_03/CJSLPA_Vol_41_No_3_2017_Rvachew_et_al_321-340.pdf
Rvachew, S. & Herbery, A. (2017). PHOPHLO: Prédiction des Habilités Orthographiques par des Habilités Langage Oral. www.DIALspeech.com
Thompson, D. & Rvachew, S. (April 19, 2019). Boys and literacy acquisition: Introduction. https://digitalmediaprojectforchildren.wordpress.com/2019/04/19/boys-and-literacy-acquisition-introduction/
Rvachew, S. & Thompson Forrester, D. (accepted). A description of boys and girls nonnverbal and verbal engagement with electronic and paper books. Journal of Cognitive Education and Psychology.
Rvachew, S., Thompson Forrester, D., & Dey, R. (accepted). Can technology help close the gender gap in literacy achievement? Evidence from boys and girls sharing ebooks. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology.
Language, Literacy, and Gender: Does a Gender Gap in Language Underlie the Gender Literacy Gap?
by Hope Anderson
Introduction
Reading is fundamental for success in modern society.1 Reading difficulties can have persistent and widespread implications on academic, vocational, and social functioning. Thus, ongoing evaluation of the effectiveness of reading instruction is necessary to ensure children fulfill their lifelong potential.
Subject
Boys underperform girls at reading to a significant degree. This has been documented on a global scale through international reading assessments.2 In one of these projects, girls outperformed boys in 48 of the 50 participating countries, whereas boys did not outperform girls in any of the countries.3 Clearly, this is a worldwide phenomenon putting boys at risk for later difficulties.
Problems
While it is unclear why girls outperform boys at reading, it is generally accepted that boys develop language more slowly than girls.4,5,6 As language is a fundamental skill for reading acquisition,7,8 this language gap could provide a potential explanation for the literacy gap. However, this may not be the case as the language gap does not persist beyond the onset of formal reading instruction; specifically, boys seem to catch up early in elementary school.9 Therefore, even though language is the foundation for reading, further exploration is required to determine whether boys’ slower acquisition of language skills plays a role in the literacy gap.
Research Context
Studies assessing language or literacy typically use one of the many available standardized language assessments. Research regarding language development, including gender differences, is extensive. However, the majority of literature that directly compares girls and boys focuses on early childhood, which makes drawing conclusions surrounding literacy development challenging. In regard to literacy, researchers in the United Kingdom particularly have paid special attention to literacy development through large scale longitudinal studies.
Key Research Questions
- Which early language skills are essential for literacy acquisition?
- How large are the gender differences in early language acquisition?
- Can it be concluded that differences in language development between boys and girls explain the gender gap in literacy?
School Based Shared Reading with iRead with Books Improves Emergent Literacy Skills
The third and final presentation for Theme IV: Teaching with eBooks in the Classroom was presented by Susan Rvachew (with co-authors from the Digital Media Project Susan Rvachew, Kathrin Rees, Aparna Nadig, Elizabeth Carolan & Elizabeth Christe). This study was conducted in the context of a community reader program designed to support the oral language and emergent literacy skills of kindergarten children attending English-language schools in low-income neighborhoods in the Montreal region. The iReadWith books were developed by Tribal Nova in consultation with our research team to prompt the adult reader to use a dialogic reading style while sharing the book with the child. The books are also designed, via the linking of ‘living words’ with story congruent animations, to promote word recognition skills. A randomized within-student design was implemented to compare language and literacy outcomes after exposure to equivalent paper and iReadwith versions of two ‘Caillou’ stories in counterbalanced order. Stories were read three times in one week before outcome measures were administered. We did not find any disadvantage to the iReadwith book for story retell or story comprehension scores. We did find a significant advantage to iReadwith exposure for emergent literacy skills, and an interaction with the children’s letter knowledge skills such that children with the poorest letter knowledge skills showed the greatest advantage of exposure to the iReadwith books. Furthermore, analysis of the transcripts of reading interactions showed that adult comments and questions related to emergent literacy (i.e., print concepts, printed words, sound structure of words, and sound-letter correspondences) increased five times during iReadwith sharing in comparison to paper book sharing. When combined with the outcome of the studies described by Julia Parish-Morris, Mary Courage and Gabrielle Strouse, the conference findings in general confirm that children’s outcomes are determined by the intersection of ebook design and adult scaffolding during shared reading.
Conference abstract: We worked with Tribal Nova Inc. to develop ebooks that encourage a dialogic reading style by adults when sharing the book with a child and tested the efficacy of the books in the context of a community reader program for kindergarten children. Outcomes are described for story retell, story comprehension and emergent literacy skills as a function of the children’s letter knowledge at intake.
Conference handout: Rvachew DigLitMcGill Slide upload.
With Infants, E-Books and Traditional Books May Not Be So Different
The second presentation in Theme I (How do Parents and Children Engage with eBooks?), by Gabrielle Strouse was entitled “With Infants, E-Books and Traditional Books May Not Be So Different” (Gabrielle Strouse and Patricia Ganea). Gabrielle described her study that involved 102 toddlers who shared a traditional book or electronic book with their parent. The books were very simple apps designed for infants (Happy Babies series by Penguin Books). Therefore, there were few ‘pages’ and no narrative — the app, upon tapping, simply exposes the infant to an animal, and then the animal’s baby, with a repetitive sentence frame for labeling the illustrations. In contrast to several prior studies involving preschoolers and story books, the study revealed no disadvantage to the ebook format in terms of the quality of language input provided by the parent reader. In fact, parents and infants both made more content-related comments with the electronic book compared to the paper version of the book. Interestingly, the toddlers were observed to be highly engaged with the electronic book — more attentive than with the paper book — in direct contrast to the parent’s responses on the pre-experiment survey about their infant’s behaviors during shared reading. This study raises many questions about the intersection of the child, the ebook features and parental behaviors that must be considered before we draw firm conclusions about the potential of ebooks to support learning by children. Gabrielle is a co-author of the well-known study “Can babies learn to read: A randomized trial of baby media” . We look forward to seeing this new study in print.
Conference abstract: There is reason to believe that important differences exist in the way parents and children treat new technologies and traditional formats. In this presentation, we describe the results of a study in which parents of 102 infants aged 17 to 26 months were randomly assigned to read electronic or traditional format books with identical content with their infant.
Conference handout: Strouse DigLitMcGill slide upload.
Parent-Preschooler Interaction during Electronic and Traditional Book Reading
The Key Note presentation in Theme I (How do Parents and Children Engage with eBooks?) was presented by Julia Parish-Morris. Her presentation, Parent-Preschooler Interaction during Electronic and Traditional Book Reading (Julia Parish-Morris, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff & Brenna Hassinger-Das) perfectly covered the themes and issues that would reverberate throughout the two days of the conference. She began by illustrating the growing infiltration of digital technology into every aspect of our children’s lives, describing this situation as a “giant unplanned experiment” that produces a great deal of anxiety as reflected in popular news stories. Julia presented several experiments, including both published and unpublished work. These studies led to a common conclusion: interactive features such as hotspots and animations in electronic books increase “behavior-related” talk by parents and lead to a competition for control of the device during shared reading by parents and children. All these distractions hamper story comprehension by children. At the same time, the use of high quality dialogic reading prompts by parents (in particular “distancing prompts” that help the child relate story content to their own life experiences) promote story comprehension during reading with both traditional and electronic books. These findings stimulated a back and forth dialogue about alternative responses throughout the conference – do we redesign the electronic books or redesign parents’ reading strategies when using the books? Or more drastically, try to proscribe access to these digital tools altogether?
Conference Abstract: The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents read to their children daily from birth. At the same time, the AAP suggests that parents avoid screen time for children under age 2. Given these recommendations, how do we as parents, educators, clinicians, and developmental scientists, deal with the case of electronic books? Should e-books be considered shared reading, or are they more accurately categorized as screen time? In this talk, I will review a recent study of dyadic reading between three- and five-year-olds and their parents in the context of electronic books and traditional paper books. I will talk about how parent language, child language, child story comprehension, and parent enjoyment of the shared reading interaction changes when parents and children read electronic books and traditional paper books. A new study using iPad apps will be described, and language implications of screen time for our youngest children will be outlined. Finally, I will present some new ideas for electronic applications that may be beneficial in certain early childhood contexts (but not all).
Conference slides: Parish-Morris DigLitMcGill slide upload.
The Complexities and Learning Opportunities of Personalisation in Children’s Digital Books
The second talk in Theme II: Learning Language from Shared Reading with eBooks, presented by Natalia Kucirkova, was a refreshing change from many of the other presentations during the morning conference: there was no comparison of paper and ebooks with the implication that one had to be ‘better’ than the other. Rather, Natalia presented software that she created to take full advantage of the potential of digitization to completely transform the ‘book’. Her app, Our Story, allows children and their parents, teachers or peers to construct personalized multimedia stories. The presentation covered the functionality of the app and the advantages of personalization from the theoretical and empirical perspectives as outlined in more detail in Kucirkova’s prior publications.
Conference abstract: In this paper, I use the personalisation framework developed by Oulasvirta & Blom, (2008), to reflect on the various forms personalisation can take in children’s digital reading materials, paying close attention to the notions of agency, aesthetics and bidirectionality in multimedia.
Conference handout: Kucirkova DigLitMcGill slide upload.
Story-Related Discourse by Parent-Child Dyads: A Comparison of Typically Developing Children and Children with Language Impairments Reading Print Books and eBooks
The fourth and final presentation in Theme I (How do Parents and Children Engage with eBooks?) was the only talk to concern children with language impairment. The talk, presented by Kathrin Rees, described story-related discourse by parent-child dyads that were enrolled in a therapeutic program for children with language impairments, administered by Jackie Morrison-Visentin. The program was designed to teach parents, in small groups, how to use books to improve their children’s language skills in the home environment. The data that Kathrin presented was taken from video recordings collected during the pretreatment assessment. The assessment included a wordless picture book and an electronic picture book. Mean turn length (measured in number of words, as produced by children) was observed to decline for both children with language impairment and children with typically developing language in this study when the parents switched from the wordless picture book to the iReadwith ebook. The number of questions and comments produced by the parents increased markedly when the parents read the iReadwith book, compared to the wordless paper book. Consequently, the children with typical language increased the number of responses to their parents’ questions and comments. However, the children with language impairment actually reduced the number of responses to their parents’ bids for attention. Therefore it appeared that the animated features of the book that were designed to increase parental use of dialogic reading prompts were effective; at the same time, the animated features of the book that were designed to sustain child engagement interfered with verbal dialogue between parent and child in the dyads involving children with language impairment. This study reinforces the common theme that the outcome of shared reading with ebooks is determined by the intersection of child characteristics, book features and parental behaviors. The appropriate policy responses remain unclear. Should parents of children with language impairment be specifically advised to avoid ebooks? Should parents of children with language impairment be taught to use a different reading style (more parallel talk and fewer dialogic reading prompts)? Should parents of children with language impairment choose simpler ebooks (the infant style books described by Gabrielle Strouse for example?). Quite frankly, we do not know the answers to these questions. Clearly there are many more studies to conduct with this population!
Conference abstract: This presentation addresses the linguistic engagement apparent in the extratextual talk of two groups of parents and preschoolers reading a paper book and an interactive eBook (children with typical language development and children with impaired language).
Conference handout: Rees DigLitMcGill slide upload.
Shared e-reading is better e-reading: an uncertain certainty
by Kathrin Rees, Doctoral Candidate, School of Communication Sciences and Disorders
Mobile media continue to increase rapidly in popularity. A report put together by Victoria Rideout (2013) for Common Sense Media found a decrease in average daily use of “traditional” screen media such as television or computers for the group of 0 to 8 year-old children, whereas the time per day this group spent with mobile media (e.g., smartphones, tablets) had tripled within the same two-year period. E-books in particular are popular with children, although parents are ambivalent about these devices. They have many questions reflecting multifaceted concerns such as tradeoffs between excessive screen time and the potential academic benefits of some digital products. For professionals working with families, it is a challenge to adequately answer parent’s questions because the research evidence remains fragmentary and often contradictory.
For instance, it is not quite clear whether e-books should generally be recommended for shared reading with children, i.e. an adult and child (or several children) reading e-books together on a screen. This is a fundamental question that has been settled in the case of print books: it is well established that children learn important language skills from shared reading. Family literacy groups expend considerable resources promoting this practice by providing books to families and teaching families shared reading techniques. In the case of e-books however the research is unclear. Some studies (e.g., Segal-Drori et al., 2013) suggest that preschoolers, especially children from lower socio-economic backgrounds, learn more from e-books when they are shared with an adult. Other studies, including a recent meta-analysis (Takacs et al., 2014), have found that carefully placed features such as motion pictures, sound, and music can scaffold children’s learning to a similar degree as the comments adults provide during shared reading of print books. Surveys such as the one by Vaala and Takeuchi (2012) reveal that some parents do not enjoy reading e-books with their children: given this finding, perhaps we can conclude that solitary reading of e-books by children is a beneficial practice in some families.
Given this scant and conflicting research base, how have experts in children’s media use been responding to families’ e-book-related questions? Three non-profit organizations, two American and one Canadian, have recently published guidelines for parents regarding e-books. Interestingly, they appear unified in the core assumption that for young children, shared e-reading is generally better e-reading. Upon closer examination it turns out that all three organizations infer this insight from available research. The reader needs to be critically aware that a majority of the research underlying these guidelines is only partially related to e-reading; often the research is concerned with joint (paper) book reading and television co-viewing rather than shared reading with digital tablets directly.
Why is learning language from video harder than learning from live interaction until age 2?
By Aparna Nadig
In my last post I discussed evidence that children under age 2 tend to learn new words better when an adult labels a new object during interaction, than when watching the adult label the object via video. This phenomenon has been called the video deficit (Anderson & Pempek, 2005).
Why would this be the case? One straightforward explanation is familiarity; infants and toddlers interact with adults and learn from them day in and day out, whereas they traditionally have had much less exposure and interaction with screen representations in the first years of life. They may need to acquire experience with screens before they can learn from them as easily as they learn from a live person.
This simple difference in familiarity seems to be linked with at least two deeper kinds of differences that set live interaction apart from information presented on video: how socially relevant or meaningful the content is, and the ability to understand two-dimensional representation of the real world (see Barr, 2010 and Troseth, 2010 for reviews).
Digital Media Project 