Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-2021
Division
School of Education Counseling and Psychology in Education
Keywords
Scaffolding, Word learning, Symbolic development, Video
Disciplines
Developmental Psychology
Abstract
Young children struggle to learn new words presented on video, but adult co-viewers can support them by providing scaffolds that explicitly connect the video and real world. In this study, we asked whether scaffolding facilitates children’s symbolic understanding of the video, such that they will subsequently transfer labels from video to real referents. Sixty-three 30-month-olds and 61 36-month-olds participated in a series of three word learning trials in one of three conditions. In the supportive condition, an in-person adult explicitly drew connections between each on-screen object and the corresponding real object in the room with the child. In the unsupportive condition, the in-person adult provided similar-length statements about the objects but did not draw connections between them. In the partial scaffold condition, the in-person adult provided the supportive scaffolds for the first two trials and the unsupportive version for the third trial. At 30 months, children selected the correct object on the third trial more often in the supportive than the unsupportive scaffold condition, and performance in the partial scaffold condition fell in between. At 36 months, performance on the third trial did not differ across conditions. The results showed that experiencing the scaffold twice was not enough to reliably support 30-month-olds in learning to think symbolically on the third trial; rather, they appeared to rely on the adult to connect the video image with its specific real-world referent. At 36 months, however, children did not rely on the adult scaffold to apply the video label to the real-world objects.
Publication Title
Infant Behavior and Development
Volume
64
First Page
101574
Rights
© 2021. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
DOI
doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101574
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Strouse, G. A., & Ganea, P. A. (2021). Learning to learn from video? 30-month-olds benefit from continued use of supportive scaffolding. Infant Behavior and Development, 64, 101574. Special Issue: Digital media and children under 3 years of age. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101574
Comments
Study pre-registration and materials can be viewed at https://osf.io/8fbkg/
Full-text when available:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101574