Children’s Preference for Causal Information in Storybooks

Abstract

Fostering early literacy depends in part on engaging and inspiring children's early interest in reading. Enriching the causal content of children's books may be one way to do so, as causal information has been empirically shown to capture children's attention. To more directly test whether children's book preferences might be driven by causal content, we created pairs of expository books closely matched for content and complexity, but with differing amounts of causal information embedded therein. Three and 4 years old participants (n = 48) were read both books and their interests and preferences were evaluated. When asked to choose, children preferred the highly causal over the minimally causal books. Results are discussed in terms of broader implications for creating books that optimally engage young children, as well as guiding book selections parents and educators make in their endeavors to promote interest in reading and early literacy.

Comparing drawing tasks and elaborate single-choice questions in simulation-based learning: how do they facilitate students’ conceptual understanding on chemical equilibria?

“…We hypothesize, that convergent phenomena in simulation-based settings not only require a higher cognitive load to be recognized, since it is much easier to spot a significant deviation than to assure, that two situations are equal. We also believe this observation to be in line with humans' preference of causality over statistics (Hoffrage et al, 2000;Matute et al, 2015;Shavlik et al, 2020), which in our eyes also contributes to students' struggles with physical chemistry concepts in general (Cartier, 2009;Bain et al, 2014;Bain and Towns, 2016). When a change in one variable yields a direct and observable change in system behaviour, such as in a divergent simulation setting, it seems easier to reduce the complex behaviour of a many-particle system to a single causality and to generate causal explanations in line with A. L. , thereby fostering conceptual understanding.…”

“…However, it is important to note, that this specification explicitly refers to the nature of the scientific phenomenon explored via simulation, and not to the instructional design of the simulation-based activity. In our experience, a divergent relationship is easily investigated via simulation, since this so called divergent behaviour suits learners' need for causality (Matute et al, 2015;Shavlik et al, 2020) and hence facilitates mental interaction.…”

Investigating Science Together: Inquiry-Based Training Promotes Scientific Conversations in Parent-Child Interactions

“…Moreover, by the age of three, children begin asking a substantial number of questions focusing on causal inferences (Isaacs, 1930;Callanan and Oakes, 1992;Chouinard et al, 2007;Frazier et al, 2009Frazier et al, , 2016Corriveau and Kurkul, 2014), indicating that children themselves may recognize that causal content is useful for learning about the world around them. In line with this, recently published research has demonstrated that 3-and 4-years-old selectively seek out books that contain "highly causal" as opposed to books that contain "minimally causal" information (Shavlik et al, 2020). Thus, parent talk focusing on highlighting and explaining causal relations between scientific phenomena provides access to information that may be especially engaging to children and support their learning of opaque scientific content.…”

A Delphi survey-based development and validation of cognitive-communication assessment tool for Indian preschoolers

“…The review of preschool textbooks facilitated the selection of familiar vocabulary for Indian preschoolers, and the story structure followed story grammar, logical structure, and psychological causality to facilitate better understanding and recall ( 16 ) . The story also incorporated an animal character in the storyline, as most storybooks for preschool children used animal characters to attract children's attention and interest ( 30 ) . Although story-based tasks have been used in previous studies to explore cognitive skills in preschoolers, they were restricted to a specific cognitive domain ( 25 , 28 ) .…”