Project Background
The goal of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching science vocabulary using interactive digital stories. Academic vocabulary, including science vocabulary, is essential to build a strong conceptual and linguistic foundation for later school achievement by enabling knowledge building, discussion, and sharing. However, young children often experience a lack of opportunities to learn science and science vocabulary in early childhood classrooms.
Given science vocabulary is also language, and language is best learned in an interactive way, socially and cognitively, one way to address this challenge is to design "interactive" science vocabulary instruction that children have an easy access to. In our recent work, we have argued that using stories can help students learn vocabulary. We also have demonstrated that interactive use of narrative stories (i.e., using hot spots integrated with story-related prompts and questions) in digital stories resulted in better understanding and comprehension.
This suggests that science vocabulary can be taught effectively using narrative stories as these can describe process or cause-effect of a science concept in the sequence of events that children find relatable or engaging. Further, young children may understand better if these stories can be presented as an interactive digital format that allows which prompts and asks questions mimicking teacher-child conversations and allows children to manipulate animations on the screen of the tablet where digital stories are presented. Thus, the proposed research attempts to evaluate the possible impact of utilizing interactive digital stories on science vocabulary learning of young children from low SES families.
Student Role
A student will be closely working with the principal investigator and graduate students for almost entire process of the research project throughout the summer period. We expect the final stage of producing digital format of stories and data collection of children's science language learning with digital stories will occur as the student starts the SPUR. The student can participate in digital story creation and data collection, then spend their time in data cleaning and analysis. Original data will be cleaned and analyzed in SPSS statistical software and the student will learn about basic data analysis methods. Thus, the student will experience the data collection, data cleaning, and reduction, and statistical analysis part of the research project.
Student Learning Outcomes and Benefits
In addition to the student's familiarity with the current topics in early science education and digital and multimedia learning, the student will learn how an experimental educational study will be set up and experience actual data collection, which is the most important aspect of hands-on learning and experience of empirical research studies in education and psychology. Most students are familiar with facts and knowledge in educational psychology by reading, understanding, or memorizing them but are lacking understanding of "how" the knowledge is created by "whom" and "why.
I expect that this research will provide opportunities for the student to have a better idea of how knowledge in educational psychology is created, what an educational psychology researcher is doing, and what a graduate school will be for. I expect this experience opens not just summer research opportunities with funding but in-depth understanding of the field of educational psychology and its science, which will lead to further interests in an advanced graduate degree and a future research career. I am also interested in continuing mentorship, establishing a long-term mentoring relation with the student, either formally or informally after the SRUP is over.