Research Spotlight

The Research Spotlight section of the monthly newsletter is one way Children’s School parents can learn about research in progress.

Also, each time your child participates in a study that involves playing a “game” with a researcher (i.e., as opposed to merely being observed), he or she will get a participation sticker suggesting that you, “Ask me about the … game” and a study description detailing the task.

Feel free to contact Dr. Vales to discuss any questions you have about research.

During summer camp, we hosted five research projects. Just like during the school year, if a child participates in a research project, they receive an “Ask me about the __ game” sticker and a letter describing the research game they played that day is sent home in their backpack.

The first two projects – the Odd-Fish-Out Game and the Speedy Geometry Matching Game – started during the school year and you can read more about them in the archive of the research updates.

In the Learning About Insects Game, Gillian Gold, a Ph.D. student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, is looking at whether different ways of learning new information matter for how children learn – in particular, whether children learn differently in situations where they passively encounter new information (like when reading a book that says ‘insects have three body parts and six legs’) compared to situations where children receive feedback on inferences they generate themselves (like when guessing that a spider is an insect and being told that is not quite right because spiders don’t have three body parts). To help answer this question, children play one of three versions of the game. In one version, children are first told a fact, such as ‘insects are hard on the outside’, and are then told that ladybugs are hard on the outside, so ladybugs are insects. In another version, children are told the same fact and then asked to point to which animal was the insect (the ladybug). In a third version, children are first asked to guess which animal is an insect and are then told the same fact. By comparing how children learn the facts across the different versions of the game, the research team can find out whether these different experiences with new information result in different learning.

Riley Lawrence, a rising senior undergraduate student who received a summer fellowship to start working on her honors thesis in Linguistics and Psychology under the supervision of Dr. Christina Bjorndahl, is conducting the Listening and Repeating Word Games for her thesis project. The goal of Riley’s project is to understand how children learn to tell the sounds “s” and “sh” apart, both when hearing and when speaking. To answer this question, children play two word games. In the listening game, children hear words like “Sue”, “shoe”, “sip”, or “ship” and press the button that corresponds to the picture of that word. Some of the words sound ambiguous, and the children’s responses to these ambiguous words help the researchers learn what speech features children use to hear the difference between “s” and “sh”. In the repeating game, children are asked to repeat out loud a word they hear. These verbal responses are used to identify the speech features children use to say the difference between “s” and “sh”. Understanding the connection between hearing and speaking, and seeing how it changes with age, will help the researchers understand how children learn to distinguish between speech sounds.

Anyone who has observed a young child learn a new motor skill like writing knows how hard it is to be fast and precise with new movements. In the Spaceship Game, Teo Ozaydin (a research associate working with Dr. Jessica Cantlon and Dr. Jonathan Tsay) is looking at how children learn new motor skills. Their team developed a space-themed game called “Galactic Navigation”, which is played on a touchscreen tablet over two days. In the game, children launch space flights by following a path with their finger until a spaceship reaches a target planet. Some paths are repeated over time and others are presented only once. By comparing flights on the repeated path with flights on brand-new paths, and by comparing the first and second days, the researchers can measure how quickly children learn a new movement skill, how well they remember it, and if it transfers to new movements – which helps understand the building blocks of everyday skills such as handwriting and drawing.

Stay curious!
Dr. Catarina Vales
(as always, let me know if you have any questions about research)