“Literacy is basically everything when it comes to academic achievement,” says education professor Dr. Tanya Kaefer.
This awareness motivated her to work with television writers from PBS’s beloved Sesame Street and animators from Nickelodeon’s popular Blue’s Clues to create educational videos and ebooks for children who are at risk of falling behind academically.
Dr. Tanya Kaefer is studying how early language experiences and media exposure prepare children for the challenges of reading. She completed a PhD in developmental psychology at Duke University followed by a post-doctorate at the University of Michigan’s School of Education because, she says, “I wanted to apply cognitive psychology principles to the classroom.”
Dr. Kaefer, a Lakehead Orillia faculty member, is part of a team of education researchers from New York University and West Texas A & M University who received a $1.47 million grant from the Institute for Education Science for their multi-year study “Reducing Knowledge Gaps for low-income and educationally at-risk pre-kindergartners through taxonomically organized books and screen media.”
The study’s goal is to improve the literacy of four-year-old and five-year-old students in urban preschool programs in the Bronx so that they can catch up to classmates in other New York City school districts and thrive—both in school and in life.
“Research has shown that literacy and knowledge development affect children’s sense of self in a positive way,” Dr. Kaefer says. “These skills have long-term effects, including whether or not children graduate from high school and, in turn, if they go to college or university.”
Knowledge development is an information-gathering process that is necessary to foster reading abilities. “To comprehend what we read, we need to have a little bit of preexisting knowledge,” Dr. Kaefer says. For example, if a child isn’t familiar with the word “alligator,” they can look it up in a dictionary—but if they don’t understand the meaning of the words used to define “alligator” they won’t be able to add this new word to their vocabulary.
“If background knowledge makes a big difference to literacy and comprehension levels, how do they get that knowledge?” Dr. Kaefer continues. “Where have children learned the things that they’ve learned? We’re looking at how kids learn from screen media and how they apply it to reading comprehension.”
Making Kids Know-it-Alls
To achieve their objectives, the researchers created educational ebooks and short minute-and-a-half videos called KNOW IT All! for preschool students in the study—96% of whom are economically disadvantaged.
They chose to work with low-income students because these children face greater barriers to literacy. “High-income learners are more likely to have access to bookstores and generously funded libraries, as well as parents with more time and money to devote to their children’s education, which results in better literacy.” Dr. Kaefer says. In addition, teachers tend to choose books that highlight experiences that high-income students are familiar with because these experiences often parallel the teachers’ own experiences.
A scene from KNOW IT ALL! demonstrating the concept of camouflage by showing how birds use camouflage to hide from predators.
“I remember being in a Thunder Bay kindergarten classroom where the teacher was reading The Gruffalo storybook aloud, but before reading it, she did a knowledge development exercise to enhance their comprehension of the book. She asked the students what animals they might find in the forest. Most of the kids were all over it. They were shouting, ‘deer, bears, skunks!’ but there were some new Canadian students who were left out because they didn’t know any Northwestern Ontario animals. That’s why we recommend choosing books that are inclusive of every child.”
Laying the groundwork for research project videos and ebooks included figuring out how children make connections between words and visual images, choosing the genres of videos to produce, and deciding what form the scripts should take.
“It took us, the writers, and the animators about a year to complete,” Dr. Kaefer says. “The animation was excellent—we let the animators run wild as long as they didn’t compromise the concepts we were trying to get across.”
The researchers were helped by the fact that children are much more strongly drawn to images than to words. And although parents and educators often worry about the amount of time children spend on screens, according to Dr. Kaefer, “You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Screens are everywhere, so we want to make the quality of the screen content as high as possible. Kids can definitely learn from screen media.”
In the second year of the research project, the students read the ebooks and watched the KNOW IT All! videos while wearing eye-tracker technology. “This allowed us to see what the kids were paying attention to and how long they were paying attention. We were thrilled that the children not only spent more than 90% of their time on the screens, but that they learned what we wanted them to learn.”
One of the findings that emerged through their testing was that the genre of a video affected how much children learn. Specifically, children absorb more when videos are solely informational, as opposed to videos that combine informational and storytelling elements. “Perhaps because the narrative elements are distracting and make it more difficult to retain knowledge,” Dr. Kaefer speculates.
Cartoons and Creativity
This scene from KNOW IT ALL! illustrates the concept of “shelter.”
The work that Dr. Kaefer and her colleagues are doing has been attracting positive attention. When Nickelodeon wanted to develop a new TV show called ‘What’s the Word?’ to build the vocabulary of three- and four-year-old children, the KNOW IT All! animators urged them to get in touch with the research team to test the show.
“In each ‘What’s the Word?’ episode, Darryl McDaniels of the rap group Run-DMC voices an animated version of himself rapping about complex words like ‘hypothesis,’ ‘dilemma,’ and ‘persevere,’” Dr. Kaefer says. “After watching the videos, the three year olds we studied were able to understand the meaning of the featured word, which is really unusual.”
As the research team enters the final year of their grant, they are determining the best way to make the ebooks and videos work together to strengthen children’s reading comprehension. “By the end of the project, we will have a prototype learning program that can be used in schools across North America, and because it is screen based, it can also be used at home.”
So what can parents do to improve their child’s literacy? “Increase their knowledge. The more kids know, the more literate they become—read to them, talk to them, and take them to museums and libraries if you can.”