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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (34)
Interactive storytelling is vital for preschooler development. While children's interactive partners have traditionally been their parents and teachers, recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked a surge of AI-based storytelling and reading technologies. As these technologies become increasingly ubiquitous in preschoolers' lives,...
Educational television programs are important learning resources for young children, especially those from underresourced households. These programs’ potential can be amplified if children are given the opportunity to meaningfully interact with media characters during their video watching. In this project, we partnered with PBS KIDS to develop inte...
The study examined how children's self‐regulation skills measured by the strengths and weaknesses of ADHD symptoms and normal behavior rating are associated with story comprehension and how verbal engagement and e‐book discussion prompts moderate this relation. Children aged 3–7 ( N = 111, 50% female, Chinese as first language) read an interactive...
Bilingual children have unique needs for school readiness as they navigate between two languages and cultures. A supportive home language environment, where children are frequently exposed to language through conversation and reading, can positively impact their language development and prepare them for school. However, current conversational agent...
While educational television or video programs are important and accessible learning resources for young children, the lack of contingent interaction afforded within this type of programming may limit how much children learn from them. In this project, we leveraged natural language processing technologies to enable contingent interaction between ch...
Evaluation in machine learning is usually informed by past choices, for example which datasets or metrics to use. This standardization enables the comparison on equal footing using leaderboards, but the evaluation choices become sub-optimal as better alternatives arise. This problem is especially pertinent in natural language generation which requi...
Question answering (QA) is a fundamental means to facilitate assessment and training of narrative comprehension skills for both machines and young children, yet there is scarcity of high-quality QA datasets carefully designed to serve this purpose. In particular, existing datasets rarely distinguish fine-grained reading skills, such as the understa...
Despite its benefits for children's skill development and parent-child bonding, many parents do not often engage in interactive storytelling by having story-related dialogues with their child due to limited availability or challenges in coming up with appropriate questions. While recent advances made AI generation of questions from stories possible...
Dialogic reading, when children are read a storybook and engaged in relevant conversation, is a powerful strategy for fostering language development. With the development of artificial intelligence, conversational agents can engage children in elements of dialogic reading. This study examined whether a conversational agent can improve children's st...
Storybook reading accompanied by adult-guided conversation provides a stimulating context for children’s language development. Conversational agents powered by artificial intelligence, such as smart speakers, are prevalent in children’s homes and have the potential to engage children in storybook reading as language partners. However, little resear...
Lay Description
What is already known about this topic
Interactive features, such as hotspots on which children can press to receive visual or auditory effects, are commonly incorporated in children's electronic books.
Hotspots may stimulate children's engagement and help children understand the content of the story; hotspots may also increase the...
Increasingly, children are engaging in early literacy experiences through digital devices. This raises questions about how electronic reading compares to print reading. To assess this, we randomly assigned 200 children (3–5 years) to be read the same book (1) with auto-narration on a tablet or 2) by a researcher from a print book. Reading was recor...
Electronic books (e-books) with audio narration are often touted as enabling pre-literate children to read independently, which, indeed, is the most common way children utilized e-books in the U.S. However, young children may have trouble navigating e-books, as their cognitive and fine motor skills are still developing. Compared to print-books, e-b...
Objectives
In China, 61 million children have been left behind in their original rural communities by migrant-labor parents, among whom 60% live apart from their migrant mother. This study examined the associations of mother versus father absence with adolescents’ academic achievement, cognitive ability, and emotional well-being in rural China as w...
Young children increasingly interact with voice-driven interfaces, such as conversational agents (CAs). The social nature of CAs makes them good learning partners for children. We have designed a storytelling CA to engage children in book reading activities. This case study presents the design of this CA and investigates children's interactions wit...
Seventh and eighth grade students in a within-teacher randomized control study read from visual-syntactic formatted text for 44 minutes per week over the course of a year. On the annual state assessment, we found small statistically significant improvements on the overall English Language Arts scaled score (ES = 0.05, p<.05) and the writing assessm...
The current study examines the effects of digital scaffolding on the English literacy of fourth‐ and sixth‐grade students. A total of 1085 native English‐speaking and language minority students from 25 treatment classes and 20 control classes across three school districts participated in this study for one school year. Treatment students read their...