Supporting Children's School Readiness.

University of Sheffield

Status: Completed

Conditions: Language Development

Treatments: Behavioral: Counting intervention; Behavioral: Language comprehension intervention

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT02854462

R/139470-11-1-INFERENCE

Details and patient eligibility

About

The aim of this project is to test whether training parents to ask their children 'inference- eliciting' questions during book reading is effective in promoting story comprehension for 4-year-olds from a range of socio-economic backgrounds.

Full description

Language comprehension relies on the ability to make local and global inferences (e.g., inferring what a pronoun refers to, or inferring why a protagonist in a story did something based on information distributed through the text). These skills develop in the preschool years and are demonstrated when children make sense of stories that are read to them. While important for later reading ability and academic success, relatively little is known about whether anything can be done to improve inference-making skills in the preschool years. One possibility is that parent-child book reading would help. During book reading, some parents naturally ask their children questions about the story that would require them to make inferences about the text. The current study is designed to test whether doing this promotes children's ability to make inferences. Half the parents in this study will be given books with inference eliciting questions added to them and will be provided with training about how to ask these questions and respond to their children's answers. The other half of the parents will be given a maths exercise book and asked to spend the same amount of time per day working through this.

Enrollment: 100 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 50 to 56 months old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

Children are:

First born Full term (i.e. born no more than 3 weeks prematurely) With birth weight over 2.5 kg Being raised as monolingual English speakers

Exclusion criteria

Neither caregivers nor infants have any significant known physical, mental or learning disability.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Basic Science

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Triple Blind

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100 participants in 2 patient groups

Language comprehension intervention

Experimental group

Description:

The intervention will run for 4 weeks. Caregivers will be provided with storybooks (e.g., Percy the Park Keeper) that have been amended to include inference-eliciting questions. Caregivers will be trained (with a video) to ask these questions and respond to their children's answers during shared reading sessions. They will be asked to read one book per day. Caregivers will keep a reading diary.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Language comprehension intervention

Counting intervention

Active Comparator group

Description:

The intervention will run for 4 weeks. Caregivers will be provided with a book 'At home with counting' that is made up of age appropriate maths exercises. Caregivers will trained (with a video) to work through one page of the book per day. This should take the same amount of time as the activity in the language intervention condition. Caregivers will keep a counting diary.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Counting intervention