Dissertation Title: Digital Expressive Media for Supporting Early Literacy through Child-Driven, Scaffolded Play

Zoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/879811807?pwd=QXJYZm5UazdOc29veFFGYjlVdVdGZz09 (access code: 361969)

Abstract:

Digital technology holds many promises for supporting early literacy development. However, almost every instance of early literacy technology is designed within the instructionist paradigm, leaving little agency to the child and failing to meaningfully connect to the child’s life. Many voices in educational theory and practice argued for the importance of playful, personally meaningful, agency- and self-efficacy-stimulating forms of learning - the importance not only in terms of immediate learning outcomes, but also in terms of long-term positive relationship with the subject. Positive relationship with literacy is particularly valuable given the potentially transformative effect that it can have on a person. This thesis will present an exploration of how these values can be incorporated into digital learning technology for early literacy learning - in particular, to support development of phonological awareness and knowledge of letter-sound-pattern correspondence.

The present exploration is guided by three design principles. First, this work focuses on “child-driven” technology, where the initiative and ideas come from the learner.  Second, it concentrates on expressive media - technologies that foster the creation of messages or artistic artifacts. To enhance the expressive potential, I designed the media to be open-ended. Third, the media  provide built-in scaffolding to assist the child in real time in accomplishing his/her self-selected goals. Scaffolding acts as a substitute for systematic, ordered instruction, which has been argued to be essential for phonological awareness development in some learners, but the rigidity of which is incompatible with child-drivenness. Several forms of scaffolding were explored: (1) direct guidance routines with various forms of input, (2) facilitating invented spelling, and (3) phoneme-based building blocks aimed at eschewing the orthographic complexities of English. Design-driven methodology was undertaken for this work. The approach was evaluated in context of two early literacy apps - minimalistic SpeechBlocks I and scaffolded SpeechBlocks II. The data for the formative evaluation comes from play-testing sessions with children as well as four larger exploratory studies. These studies were conducted both in classrooms and in home contexts.

The following was learned from the studies. (1) The media generated intrinsic motivation to play, supported the senses of agency and self-efficacy, and allowed children to express themselves in non-trivial ways. (2) There were markedly different ways of using the media, ranging from chaotic, impulsive exploration to sophisticated imaginative play. (3) The media encouraged social play around literacy activities. (4) Real-time, built-in scaffolding for making real words was essential in supporting meaningful participation of early literacy learners. I surmise that this crucial role of scaffolding is related to the specifics of early writing domain: relatively mechanical at a low level, but highly creative at a high level. Scaffolding allowed children to engage in high-level creativity while simplifying the necessary low-level routine. (5) Different types of scaffolding fulfilled different functions: responding to children’s specific requests, facilitating the search for ideas and acting as a reliable fallback option. (6) Because of extensive use of direct guidance mode by children, the distinction between letter and phoneme blocks turned out to be less important than originally thought. However, onomatopoeic mnemonics (designed for phoneme blocks) facilitated block finding for a certain category of children. (7) Initial phonological awareness and executive function appear to be moderating factors in how productive was children’s engagement with the media. In addition to these general learnings, a variety of specific observations was made that can be beneficial to educators and designers of learning technology.

Committee members :
Deb Roy (advisor), Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT Media Lab
Mitchel Resnick, LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research, MIT Media Lab
Catherine Snow, Patricia Alberg Graham Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education