Conference PaperPDF Available

Scaffolding the scaffolding: Supporting children-s social-emotional learning at home

February 2016

DOI:10.1145/2818048.2820007

Conference: the 19th ACM Conference

Authors:

Petr Slovak

King's College London

Christopher Frauenberger

IT:U (Interdisciplinary Transformation University)

Ran Gilad-Bachrach

Tel Aviv University

Mia Doces

Committee for Children

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The development of strong social and emotional skills is central to personal wellbeing. Increasingly, these skills are being taught in schools through well researched curricula. Such social-emotional learning (SEL) curricula are most effective if reinforced by parents, thus transferring the skills into everyday contexts. Traditional SEL programs have however had limited success in engaging parents, and we argue that technology might be able to help bridge this school-home divide. Through interviews with SEL experts we identified central design considerations for technology and SEL content: the reliance on experiential learning and the need to scaffold the parents in scaffolding the interaction for their children. This informed the design of a technology probe comprising a magnet card and online SEL activities, deployed in a school and via Mturk. The results provide a nuanced understanding of how technology-based interventions could bridge the school-home gap in real-world settings and support at-home reinforcement of children's social-emotional skills.

The probe-a magnet serving as a portal to digital content

…

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Scaffolding the scaffolding: Supporting children’s

social-emotional learning at home

Petr Slov´

ak1, Kael Rowan2, Chris Frauenberger1, Ran Gilad-Bachrach2, Mia Doces 3

Brian Smith 3, Rachel Kamb3, Geraldine Fitzpatrick1

1Human Computer Interaction Group, Vienna University of Technology, Austria

2VIBE, Microsoft Research Redmond, US

3Committee for Children, Seattle, US

ABSTRACT

The development of strong social and emotional skills is cen-

tral to personal wellbeing. Increasingly, these skills are be-

ing taught in schools through well researched curricula. Such

social-emotional learning (SEL) curricula are most effective

if reinforced by parents, thus transferring the skills into every-

day contexts. Traditional SEL programs have however had

limited success in engaging parents, and we argue that tech-

nology might be able to help bridge this school-home divide.

Through interviews with SEL experts we identiﬁed central

design considerations for technology and SEL content: the

reliance on experiential learning and the need to scaffold the

parents in scaffolding the interaction for their children. This

informed the design of a technology probe comprising a mag-

net card and online SEL activities, deployed in a school and

via Mturk. The results provide a nuanced understanding of

how technology-based interventions could bridge the school-

home gap in real-world settings and support at-home rein-

forcement of children’s social-emotional skills.

AUTHOR KEYWORDS

Social-emotional skills; SEL; Education; Children; Home.

ACM CLASSIFICATION KEYWORDS

H.5.m. [Information interfaces and presentation]: Miscella-

neous.

INTRODUCTION

Social-emotional skills—such as the ability to be aware of

own emotions, self-regulate or be empathic to others—are es-

sential to personal wellbeing as well as interpersonal relation-

ships [26, 47]. These skills are increasingly taught in schools

across the US and many other countries as part of formal pro-

grams [19], drawing on experiential learning methods such as

in-class role-plays or coaching (see [43] for a review). Such

social-emotional learning (SEL) curricula have been shown

to produce positive effects on children’s academic and per-

sonal accomplishments in the classroom (cf. [12,47]) and are

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already deployed at scale: for example, 44% of US teachers

have indicated that their school uses a school-wide SEL pro-

gram in a representative US survey [6].

Developing social-emotional skills requires a collaboration

between the school and home as two of the key social contexts

within which SE skills are developed. However, the SEL pro-

grams report limited success with engaging parents through

traditional means such as face-to-face workshops and sending

documents home. A key challenge is then how to support the

reinforcement of SEL learning beyond the classroom and in

the homes of the learners [34]. Recent work has strongly sug-

gested the potential of digital technology to play a key role in

addressing this issue [43, 44], but to date there has been very

little research in CSCW, HCI, and related ﬁelds that explores

the use of technology to link the school and home to support

the development or reinforcement of social-emotional skills

learning.

To start addressing this gap, the main aim of this work is to

explore how technology-based interventions could bridge the

school-home barrier in the context of SEL programs; and,

once in the home, how technology might support the parents

in reinforcing the social-emotional learning of their children.

In what follows, we report on a sequence of three studies.

The ﬁrst study aimed to better understand the difﬁculties in

connecting the classroom and the home and the key aspects

that need to be supported for the SEL reinforcement process

to take place. We interviewed SEL experts and trainers repre-

senting nine major SEL curricula in the US, whose programs

together reach more than 35% of all US schools. We identi-

ﬁed three key principles that any technology-based interven-

tion would need to support, from the SEL experts’ perspec-

tive. These are centred around: (i) the need for experiential

engagement with SE concepts for parents and children; (ii)

the need for scaffolding the scaffolding for parents: i.e., that

children learn through parent-scaffolded activities, but sup-

port for parents on how such scaffolding can be done should

be designed into the activity; and (iii) the lack of effective de-

livery channels that bridge the home-school gap. These prin-

ciples then guided the design of a technology probe (cf., [22])

with the aim to further explore and deepen our understanding

of the design space and promising directions.

In the second and third study, we deployed the probe in

two different contexts: an in-the-wild study with 4 class-

rooms (⇠100 families) at a US school; and a more con-

trolled deployment with 25 parent-child pairs, recruited

through MTurk, whose interactions with the probe were

recorded. These varied contexts allowed us to collect

multi-faceted data, developing an in-depth understanding of

how technology-based interventions might bridge the school-

home gap in real-world settings; as well as the detailed con-

siderations of how to design interactive content that might

support experiential learning and the scaffolding role of the

parent.

This paper makes two important contributions. First, we pro-

vide insights into the challenges in bridging classroom and

home in the context of SEL programs (as seen by the SEL

experts) as well the key learning principles that need to be

supported for SEL reinforcement to take place in the home.

Second, we present a case study of the design and deployment

of a technology probe, instantiating these principles, and thus

providing empirically grounded design suggestions for tech-

nologies supporting parent-child interactions that could re-

inforce social-emotional skills learning at home. In doing

so, this paper contributes to an important but so far under-

researched area in CSCW and HCI, with the potential for a

large scale, real-world impact.

BACKGROUND

Social and emotional learning in education is a mature ﬁeld,

with 25+ years’ history of peer-reviewed curricula that have

already been deployed to millions of pupils [12, 19, 35]. SEL

curricula teach a broad range of skills, commonly grouped

into a set of 5 core competencies: self-awareness, self-

regulation, social awareness, relationship skills, and respon-

sible decision making. The core of most curricula is a set

of structured classroom lessons [23], usually 25-40 minutes

long and delivered once a week throughout the whole school

year (and over multiple years).

Experiential learning as core principle for SEL

Teaching of social-emotional skills is predominantly based on

active experiential learning [2,13,49], with process similar to

the Kolb’s [28] experiential learning cycle. This reﬂects the

understanding that both conscious and non-conscious compo-

nents are fundamental for any social-emotional behaviour [3].

There are two underlying psychological mechanisms at play

(cf., [51]): First is the difference between declarative and pro-

cedural memory systems [45]. The declarative system stores

what a person consciously knows, such as the names of cap-

ital cities, or a memorised sequence of steps to start a com-

puter game. In contrast, procedural memory stores the be-

haviours as they become progressively automatised and thus

not necessarily consciously known; such as ‘knowing’ how

to ride a bike, or drive a car (cf., Sch¨

on [41] for experts’ re-

liance on procedural knowledge). The second psychological

mechanism describes the changes within our cognitive pro-

cesses in ‘hot’ moments, i.e., situations with high emotional

activation, such as when one is in the middle of a heated ar-

gument. These cognitive changes reduce the availability of

declarative knowledge and strengthen the use of procedural

knowledge. As social-emotional skills are tightly interwoven

with emotional activation, this mechanism explains why pro-

cedural knowledge is fundamental in SE skills learning.

Developing procedural skills requires repeated practice and

students’ own experiential learning within ‘hot’ situations. It

is for this reason that all social-emotional learning heavily re-

lies on a progression of carefully structured social situations:

starting from ‘cold’ moments, such as introducing a series

of ‘calming down steps’ that are practised out of context; to

‘warm’ situations such as role-plays or stories enacted with

puppets, where the learner is experiencing a low-intensity but

still emotional situation; and ﬁnally ‘hot’ moments when the

learner is coached through a real issue they are experiencing

at that moment. In each of these, it is the scaffolded subjec-

tive experience with emotional content that makes the social-

emotional learning effective; in addition to the cognitive un-

derstanding of ‘what one should do’.

The main challenge compared to other experiential learning

situations (e.g., physical skills such as riding a bike) is the

difﬁculty in creating situations where meaningful practice or

reinforcement can occur. To do so, one needs to facilitate

‘appropriately hot’ experiences for learner as well as scaf-

fold their involvement, as otherwise little is learned. In addi-

tion, a crucial pragmatic issue is also that many of the such

‘appropriately hot’ situations require an inherent involvement

of others: for example, when learning to self-regulate during

conﬂicts, the learner needs to experience a conﬂict situation;

and thus would normally require other people to role-play (or

actually have) a conﬂict with.

Current SEL challenges – areas in need of design

The requirement of scaffolded experiential learning leads to

a number of challenges common across all SEL curricula,

which technology support might be particularly well suited

to address. However, to date, little or no technology is used

as part of SEL curricula. See review by Slovak & Fitzpatrick

[43] for more details.

The key identiﬁed challenge for SEL is in embedding the

learning and reinforcement processes into everyday life, com-

plementing the in-class settings that the SEL curricula are de-

veloped for [43]. This points to the potential of technology-

based support to help learners: (i) identify teachable moments

within everyday interactions; (ii) scaffold reinforcement and

learning in these situations, for example in similar ways to

how teachers coach children in class; (iii) ‘stop & learn’ from

such experiences by promoting reﬂective skills (e.g., mak-

ing the interpersonal/emotional situations more tangible and

available for post-hoc reﬂection); and (iv) further support the

transfer of skills by providing novel spaces for practice that

offer a combination of eliciting relevant and strong experi-

ences, but in a safe space where failure is possible and scaf-

folding is designed into the activity itself.

These aspects are relevant for all contexts the child is in-

teracting with: e.g., the school, peer interactions, and the

home. As will be argued in the next section, embedding the

learning within the at-home context was the main immedi-

ate challenge perceived by the SEL experts during the inter-

views (cf., the next section and [44]); and is also mirrored in

the SEL literature as one of the crucial issues SEL domains

faces [13, 23, 34].

Digitally supported parent-child interaction

Although an emerging body of work shows how digital tech-

nologies can scaffold parent-child learning activities (e.g.,

[29, 30]), these are so far associated with the classical school

content such as math or literature, and are thus building

mostly on declarative rather than procedural learning pro-

cesses. In another related area, a number of projects provide

basic social skills training for people with autism, mostly as

part of the therapeutic treatment (see [26,39] for reviews); in-

cluding work looking at involving the patient’s family in the

process (e.g., [20]).

More generally, CSCW and HCI have an extended his-

tory with supporting parent-child communication, especially

when the parent and the child are at remote locations. Exist-

ing work has explored how video systems can support parent-

child relationships over long distances (e.g., [1, 53]); exam-

ined the opportunities of video-based technology to support

remote play between children and parents [21] or peers (e.g.,

[54]); and provided a technology-based support for scaf-

folded reading of books over distance (e.g., [15,38]). A num-

ber of other projects have explored the potential of technology

in co-located contexts: using tabletops to drive engagement

and parent-child interaction (see [52] for a review); dialogic

reading experiences for children and their parents on tablet

based ebooks [27]; sensor-based cooperative games [40]; and

enhancing shared play or creative storytelling among chil-

dren [7].

However, no work so far has explored if and how digital tech-

nology can support social-emotional skills reinforcement at

home for neuro-typical children.

FORMATIVE STUDY: SEL EXPERTS INTERVIEWS

Building on the theoretical background, we conducted a se-

ries of interviews with SEL program experts and trainers from

a wide range of nine established SEL curricula; altogether

reaching more than 35% US schools. Each of the interviewed

experts has been instrumental in developing their respective

curricula and brought many years of experience with real-

world deployment and evaluation of social-emotional learn-

ing curricula. Our aim was to build on this knowledge to iden-

tify the immediate key challenges and opportunities where

technology could be of use within SEL ﬁeld.

The issue of supporting parental engagement with SE skills

learning and reinforcement at home—as a fundamental op-

portunity for out-of-classroom practice of children—emerged

as one of the core themes from the preliminary analysis (cf.

[44]). In what follows, we ﬁrst describe the broader study

design and then focus speciﬁcally on the part of the data cor-

pus that unpacks the methods SEL curricula currently use to

engage parents; to facilitate situations in which experiential

learning can take place; and scaffold the progressive learning

in increasingly ‘hot’ situations.

Participants and methods

We recruited 14 SEL experts: 9 curricula developers, and

5 key trainers, representing nine of the major SEL curricula

providers to US schools. The experts had a median of 18 and

an average of 20.8 years of SEL experience, and were re-

imbursed $100 for their time. The semi-structured interviews

with each expert were conducted in person or over phone (53-

75 min long). Each interview was audio recorded, annotated

in the software package InqScribe, partially transcribed, and

thematically analyzed as per the 6 step process outlined in [5].

The themes covered in the interview included: the partici-

pants’ understanding of the challenges the learners, parents,

teachers and curricula developers currently face; what they

perceive as the key components of their program; what as-

pects are most difﬁcult to learn or teach; and what are the

actual methods they use to teach these. The following discus-

sion focuses on the key challenges identiﬁed around bridging

from the classroom to the home context and the key aspects

of the SEL learning process that need to be supported in the

home setting.

Current approaches and challenges

All of our participants’ curricula include a family component,

in the form of in-person workshops or materials sent home,

which were designed for a wide range of target populations:

from all neuro-typical children to at-risk families. The key

challenge, as perceived by the SEL experts, was about ways

to effectively reach parents and then facilitate the needed ex-

periential engagement with either one of these two methods.

For those parents who choose to engage with the training,

workshops were described as an effective way of helping par-

ents support the children’s learning, and a substantial major-

ity of parents were seen as strongly motivated to support their

child’s social-emotional development. However, the work-

shop turn-out rates were reported as often very low. While

these improve if child-care is provided and parents’ travel is

reimbursed, they are still sub-optimal even under such cir-

cumstances. The developers were also pessimistic about the

effects of printed materials sent home without the workshop

component. Even when the paper homework is actually sent

home by the teachers, then “these just do not get read (E1)”

by the parents; and also lose the social and interactive quality

of the workshops, “becoming more like schoolwork (E11)”.

The SEL experts acknowledged the complex, multifaceted

situation around why parents might or might not choose to

engage with social-emotional skills learning, such as the pos-

sibly difﬁcult relationship or the lack of trust between the

school and parents, especially in lower socio-economic areas.

However, they believed that a key difﬁculty for majority ofthe

parents rests in the general ‘busy-ness’ of their lives: the ever-

present lack of time; too many materials coming from school

to keep track of; and, for the case of workshops, the pragmatic

issues around a scheduled ﬁxed time, need to travel, and other

commitments.

Overall, the interviews suggested a need for another method

that would combine the beneﬁts both of the workshops (fa-

cilitate active, experiential learning) and materials sent home

(low barriers to involvement).

Supporting experiential learning in workshops

This section outlines the aspects that the participants see as

fundamental in making the workshop training effective; and

the lack of which limits the beneﬁts of existing materials sent

home. These are useful to identify the core aspects that would

need to be supported by the technology.

According to the SEL experts, one of the key roles for par-

ents in supporting their child’s SE development is to either

facilitate the appropriate experiential learning context for the

child; or to skillfully take advantage of naturally occurring

‘teachable moments’, such as the child having to deal with

the frustration of doing the dishes, not understanding home-

work, or having to go to bed. Such moments are plentiful

in everyday settings and can provide the best reinforcement

for children’s skills. However, the SEL experts were con-

cerned that many parents might lack the ability to provide the

needed coaching and scaffolding effectively; and that these

are also the families that might beneﬁt from SEL most (cf.,

also [17,25,49,50]). As E6 pointed, “the greatest challenge is

that adults [often] do not understand social-emotional learn-

ing; they cannot break it down for their kids”. In particular,

although the parents “think they are helping the child solve

the [social-emotional] problem, they are actually giving them

the answer (E3)”, creating a dependency rather than coach-

ing the child to develop a new skill. Moreover, many social-

emotional skills bring up topics that some parents might not

be used to discussing directly and might not know how to ad-

dress.

In response to these concerns, the workshops strive to help

parents to learn how to scaffold learning for their children.

Parents are provided with example questions they can ask (as

part of the paper-homework), practise such situations through

role-plays, and are encouraged to use on-going reinforce-

ment techniques such as a stable vocabulary for speciﬁc sit-

uations (e.g., calming down steps). The resulting scaffolding

of parent-child interaction is then closely aligned with Emo-

tion Coaching framework by Gottman and colleagues (e.g.,

[16, 17, 25]). Important aspects include inquiring about and

validating emotional experiences of the child, helping him or

her label what they are feeling, providing empathic support

when needed (e.g., through the progression of questions), and

promoting the child’s agency.

DESIGNING TO SUPPORT PARENTAL ENGAGEMENT

The background literature and the expert interviews provide

a theoretical basis to design technology in support of parental

engagement and at-home reinforcement. Social-emotional

learning fundamentally relies on experiential learning to de-

velop procedural knowledge. Supporting such learning thus

must elicit the ‘right’ social-emotional experiences for the

learner, and offer the required scaffolding to learn from the

experience. Moreover, the closer such learning is to real-

world situations, emotions, and experiences (i.e., actual ‘hot’

moments), the higher the chance that the learning will suc-

cessfully generalise to everyday settings. For example, learn-

ing how to help characters in a game to calm down is not go-

ing to be successful unless the child is additionally supported

in experiencing or recalling an angry state (e.g., through role-

play), and then helped in applying the techniques herself

when she genuinely feels mad.

In the case of supporting parental involvement, this theory

(and the best-practices shared by the SEL experts) translates

to three key concerns and corresponding research questions

for technology support in this space:

RQ1 How can technology provide a suitable delivery channel

to effectively bridge classroom learning and at-home rein-

forcement by parents?

RQ2 Assuming it reaches the parents, how can technology expe-

rientially engage parents and children with the SEL con-

cepts (as the workshops do) rather than just presenting

them with ‘dead’, non-interactive information (as per the

paper homeworks)?

RQ3 Finally, how can technology provide the scaffolding for

the scaffolding role of the parent, who needs to carefully

balance the nature and ‘hotness’ of the experience for the

child, while offering direct support only when necessary?

Moreover, the underlying aim of the SEL technology should

be similar to that of the workshops: to ‘teach and disappear’.

That is, technology should help scaffold the learning and re-

inforcement of skills during a limited period of time, so that

the newly learned skills will persist also after the technology

is taken away or just not used anymore (i.e., are not dependent

on such technology support being continuously present).

TECHNOLOGY PROBE DESIGN

To start exploring design solutions to the research questions

outlined above, we developed a ‘technology probe’ (cf., [22]).

A technology probe is simple technology that is deployed in

real-world settings with the aim to collect information about

use and appropriation, and to inspire further design ideas.

Such a methodology is well-suited to the research questions

at hand, where the in-situ appropriation of the technology by

parents, children, and teachers, forms a fundamental part of

the challenge.

Our aim was thus to create a probe that could be also de-

ployed in ecologically valid, real-world settings of a public

K8 school1, helping us identify promising mechanisms to

promote parental involvement. We developed the probe in

close collaboration with the SEL developers and researchers

at Committee for Children—the developers of Second Step,

the most widely used SEL curriculum in USA—who pro-

vided the team with key SEL expertise. This included ac-

cess to all Second Step curricula materials and weekly design

meetings.

The resulting probe comprises a 8.5 x 3.5 inch magnetic sheet

(see Figure 1), that links the users to a series of online activi-

ties (more information below), accessed through a web-page

interface. We chose a simple web-based solution to easily

cater to all operating systems across desktop, mobile phones

and tablets. The magnets were designed to be distributed to

children by their class teachers, together with a simple story

(‘Harrdy needs your help to ﬁnd the treasure’) to pique the

children’s interest.

1K8 school is a school that includes Kindergarten and Grades 1 to

8, i.e., approximately ages 5-13.

Figure 1. The probe – a magnet serving as a portal to digital content

Instantiating the design considerations

In what follows, we outline the design rationale in three sec-

tions: discussing our initial decisions on the scope of the

probe, methods to support the two core principles for the in-

tervention’s content (RQ2 + RQ3), and the delivery channel

considerations (RQ1).

Scoping decisions

We made several key decisions early on, drawing on the lit-

erature review, interviews, and the best-practices recommen-

dations of the on-team SEL experts. First, we chose to focus

on early elementary school children and their parents—i.e.,

Kindergarten through to 3rd Grade—as the target group. This

choice was motivated by research consistently showing that

SEL interventions are more effective in the early years (e.g.,

[47–49]). Second, we decided to focus the probe content on

facilitating use of consistent vocabulary across school and

home context. Such consistent verbal labelling is a crucial

aspect of many SEL curricula (cf., [4,43]), and can serve as a

natural reminder in everyday situations, reinforcing the learn-

ing (e.g., [24]). However, the SEL literature suggests that

parents are often unaware about the verbal labelling strate-

gies that their children are learning at school [34]. Finally,

we chose self-regulation (calming-down) as the speciﬁc topic

to focus on. Self-regulation is a crucial-but-challenging issue

within SEL (cf. [18,44]). Moreover we expected that helping

young children deal with frustration and anger could tap into

the existing motivation that many parents might have around

these issues.

Designing the content

The SEL theory highlights the need to scaffold ‘appropriately

hot’ emotional experiences for the learners to provide mate-

rial for experiential learning. To do so, we drew on the power

of games and stories to engage young children with emotional

content [48], and help them to re-live their own feelings from

similar situations. In our case, we re-cut and re-purposed a

Creative-Commons video to show a simple story of a grumpy

Pirate Harrdy searching for his treasure, who has his map

stolen by a monkey and gets very angry as a result. As many

children have likely experienced the ‘something was taken

from me’ scenario many times at home, on the playground,

or at school, we expected the story could likely resurface suf-

ﬁciently strong emotions for them to relate to.

To promote the parental involvement and support, the story

also created a shared experience and set the scene for a more

direct parent-child interaction. To scaffold this, we interjected

the story with questions to help the parent facilitate the learn-

ing for their child. Such a progression of questions was di-

rectly drawing on the coaching approaches used in SEL (and

taught to parents in the workshops), in this case helping the

child remember how they felt in similar situations ﬁrst and

then take the perspective of the other person. For example,

when the map is snatched away by the monkey, the video

is stopped with the question: “Have you ever had anything

grabbed from you? How did that make you feel? Tell your

adult!” This is then followed by “How do you think Har-

rdy feels now?” To further facilitate parental scaffolding, we

chose to have the questions addressed to the child and to be

read aloud by the adult. The aim was to create a sense of in-

terdependency between the child and adult, as many children

are not likely to read ﬂuently at this age. As such, the written

text nudges the parent to take the narrator role and to probe

into the emotional states of the character; he or she is also

scaffolded in helping their child do so through the carefully

selected questions.

Moreover, as the story progresses, the prompts are increas-

ingly taking the parent-child interaction from the story to real-

world activities between parent and child: they are asked to

ﬁrst explain the Calming Steps that the child learned at school

to Harrdy (and, implicitly, the parent), help Harrdy practice

one or more calming down strategies (deep breathing, count-

ing down, and positive self-talk), and eventually to role-play

the situation themselves (“Harrdy needs to see another ex-

ample ... how about your adult plays out what happened to

Harrdy and you help them calm down?”).

Finally, repeated practice—using the associated calming

down steps vocabulary serving as triggers—is crucial for re-

inforcement of self-regulation. To explore if and how the

probe could support such repeated engagement, we designed

the story as a sequence of related sub-stories, with the initial

activity ending on a cliff-hanger: the monkey runs away with

pieces of the map and Harrdy sets out to ﬁnd it. The child

is then asked to return to the activity the next day to help

him. Over three follow-up encounters, each practising one of

the three calming down strategies, the child is helping Harrdy

ﬁnd the map pieces and, eventually, the treasure.

Designing the delivery channel

The delivery channel design accounts for the three key stake-

holders in this context: the teacher (who distributes the ac-

tivity); the parents; and the children. Appreciating the inter-

view and literature ﬁndings about both parents’ and teachers’

busy life schedules, the distribution needs to (i) be simple and

quick to distribute in class and engage with at home; (ii) stand

out from the stream of other school-home messages the par-

ents are already over-burdened by; and (iii) be pragmatically

easy to build and deploy so that it can serve the data collec-

tion role on the scale of multiple classrooms (26-28 children

each).

The design of the probe drew on a ‘portal’ metaphor: the

probe was designed as a simple physical object—a magnetic

card—that is sent home with the child together with other

school-home documents. When engaged with, however, it

then serves as a virtual portal to the online activities. Mag-

nets were selected as a ‘known’ object tapping into the com-

mon family practices around putting things on a fridge in the

US; aiming to hopefully serve as an ongoing reminder and a

stable link to the dynamically changing activities over time.

Using a magnetic card, rather than a standard sheet of paper,

also provided us with the option of sending home something

possibly of ‘perceived value’ that might not be thrown away

immediately after ﬁrst use.

The probe was designed to utilise the child’s motivation to

play the activity as the key method of also engaging the par-

ents. To this end, we framed the activity as a ‘treasure hunt’,

hidden within the card, that they need to discover together

with their parents. Our design rests on the assumption that

the combination of the mystique of a magnet ‘hiding a story’

together with a likeable design would make the child an ac-

tive participant in persuading the parent to engage with the

activity; as opposed to a math homework, or the usual paper

SEL homework exercise.

Finally, we needed to design for the conﬂicting needs of pri-

vacy considerations on the one side and the data collection

functionality of the technology probe on the other. Each card

has a unique ‘secret code’ that allows us to track interactions

from each card. The secret codes also came in ‘packs’, one

per each class, allowing us to track usage on the class level as

well. However, as the system collected no personal informa-

tion and the teachers were asked to randomly distribute cards

to children in class, neither us nor the teacher were able to

ascertain which secret code belongs to which family.

STUDIES WITH THE PROBE - OVERVIEW

The probe deployments aimed to answer multiple questions:

First, test the delivery channel aspect, where the interest is

in natural uptake of the probe and understanding if and how

this (and similar) technology can ﬁt into teachers’ and par-

ents’ existing practices (RQ1). Second, analyse if and how

the designed content experientially engages parents and chil-

dren (RQ2), and whether it provides sufﬁcient scaffolding for

the scaffolding role of the parent (RQ3).

To explore these issues, we deployed the probe in two dif-

ferent contexts: First, we recruited four classrooms in a K8

school in a major US city, in which the magnets were sent

home with kids in four classrooms. This allowed us to un-

derstand the in-situ uptake within the everyday settings of

teachers, parents, and children (RQ1). The ecological va-

lidity of such in-the-wild deployment came at the expense

of limited opportunities to observe the parent-child interac-

tions directly (as that would affect the natural uptake). Sec-

ond, we thus complemented the ﬁrst study by recruiting 25

parent-child pairs on MTurk, who have consented to screen-

recording their interactions with the activity. This provided

us with detailed information about the parent-child interac-

tions around the activity that were needed to analyse RQ2

and RQ3. We report on each of the deployments individually

and combine what we have learned in the Discussion section.

STUDY 1: IN-THE-WILD DEPLOYMENT

The aim of the ﬁrst probe deployment was to study the uptake

within real-world classes and families. We aimed to under-

stand if and how similar technology could serve as an engag-

ing delivery channel, and how to design for a best ﬁt with (or

positive change of) teachers’ and parents’ existing practices.

Methodology

Participants

We recruited a school counsellor and 4 classroom teachers in

a K8 school who had taught Second Step over multiple years

already. To explore the effect of age, each of the recruited

teachers taught at a different grade level: Kindergarten, Grade

1, Grade 2, and Grade 3. As part of our recruitment, we of-

fered a $50 reimbursement each for the teachers and the coun-

sellor to compensate the organisational overhead and the time

spent with us on a (post-deployment) interview. Every child

in each of the four classes received their own magnet card to

take home to their family.

Methods and data collected

The packets of magnets (one pack per class) were sent to

the school counsellor, who distributed them to teachers. The

packets included a simple Parent Letter to be sent home with

the magnet, and an information sheet for the teachers outlin-

ing the distribution of cards: they should hand out the cards

to the class and tell a simple scripted story. Importantly,

the magnet was not framed as homework, but as an optional

extra-curricular activity.

Our server logged all interactions with the activity from any

of the cards individually, using the ‘secret code’ on each card

as the identifying information. This allowed us to collect de-

personalised information about the usage, separated into the

individual classrooms. In addition, we asked teachers and the

counsellor for a 30 minute interview, several days after the

cards were sent home (5 interviews, overall 131 minutes of

recordings); and also had the opportunity to interview some

of the children (post-deployment) about their experiences, for

40-45 minutes per class. Depending on the age range, we

interviewed groups of 3-6 children, with one or two groups

per class (27 children altogether).

The nature of the deployment made it impossible to directly

recruit parents or offer rewards for participation before the de-

ployment as this would alter the natural uptake. We however

attempted to elicit feedback from parents in three alternative

ways: At the end of the activity—i.e., the parents must have

engaged with it already—the parents were asked to rate the

activity via two sliders, namely ‘perceived usefulness’ and

‘child enjoyment’. At this point, we also invited the parents

to take part in a 10-15 min phone or Skype call, offering a

$10 Amazon voucher in appreciation of their participation.

Finally, the teachers invited the parents (through email) to

participate in a 5 min online survey two to three weeks af-

ter deployment, connected to a $40 rafﬂe prize.

Deployment results

Activity logs – at-home engagement

The lack of delivery channels to effectively engage parents

with SEL content is one of key issue we identiﬁed in the lit-

erature and interviews (RQ1). A fundamental question of the

ﬁrst deployment was whether the activity will reach parents

Class 1 16 62% 15 58% 6 23% 5 19%

Class 2 14 54% 11 42% 6 23% 5 19%

Class 3 15 58% 13 50% 9 35% 4 15%

Class 4 12 46% 11 42% 7 27% 3 12%

Used

at least once

Finished

first activity

Returned

at least once

Returned

all three times

Table 1. Activity usage across classes

at all; or “just not get read” as seems to the case for paper

materials. We focus on two key aspects in our analysis.

First, we explored the activity usage aiming to understand the

extent of involvement for individual cards. The main indi-

cators of interest were whether the family logged-on at least

once, if they ﬁnished the ﬁrst activity, and if they repeatedly

returned to the card to continue the story. An overview of the

results is in Table 1. Overall, our data shows that between

46% to 62% of distributed cards have been used in individ-

ual classes, and a large percentage of those who started have

ﬁnished at least the ﬁrst activity (78% to 93%). Putting this

in context, the teacher’s interviews (cf., next section) suggest

that reaching initial engagement levels of ⇠50% can be con-

sidered a success. A much smaller proportion of families re-

turned to the activity for follow-up stories; the teachers’ in-

terviews indicate that one possible contributing factor is that

the option to continue the story was not clear to some partici-

pants. Note that the logged data does not contain information

about whether the cards were used with a parent, sibling, or

alone. The interviews with children and the school counsellor

however suggest that a large proportion of parents did know

about and engaged with the card (see below).

Second, we looked at the ratings data submitted by families

immediately after ﬁnishing the ﬁrst activity. Out of the fam-

ilies that reached this point, 59.6% submitted a rating. Both

‘perceived usefulness’ (mean 86.9, SD 18.0) and ‘child en-

gagement’ (mean 76.4, SD 22.4) were rated relatively high

on the scale from 0 of 100. Only 4 people indicated a rating

lower than the neutral point (50/100) on either of the scales.

Overall, this suggests that, at least those who rated, have both

enjoyed the activity as well as found it relatively useful.

Fitting into teacher’s practices

Teachers play an important role in any delivery channel try-

ing to bridge school and at-home learning. To better under-

stand how the probe (and similar technologies) could ﬁt into

the school context, we inquired about the methods the teach-

ers use to connect and engage with parents at the moment,

their opinions on the activity as a learning tool, and what they

would consider as success in terms of parental engagement

with the probe2.

All teachers valued thinking about ways of engaging the par-

ents with SEL (as well as other subjects), especially as a pre-

ventive measure: “Ideally we would involve parents more.

It is so far with the parents of kids who have [behavioural]

2At the time of the interview, the teachers have just sent the cards

home, but did not know if and how many parents might engage with

the activity.

problems and then we have these conversations [...] but ide-

ally, you would give these strategies pre-emptively (T2).” In

particular, involving the parents with at-home learning was

seen as a general problem: when sending anything home, “we

get around 50% for anything that requires an adult (T1)”.

Getting to higher engagement ratios then seemed to require

substantial ‘bugging work’ on the part of the teachers, such

as sending the information repeatedly through multiple chan-

nels (such as emails, newsletter and printouts) or requiring

the child to collect a signature from the parents. The teachers

were also particularly pessimistic about the ratio of parents

who would already know about the Calming Down strate-

gies (or other SEL content) as “they probably read it in the

newsletter [a few months back], and forgot about it. (T3)”.

In terms of engagement rates for the probe activity, all teach-

ers mentioned that 50% parents engaging with the probe

would be something they consider a success, especially as

it is framed as a voluntary activity. The biggest concern for

most teachers was keeping a level ﬁeld for all the students:

a common worry was that through the use of technology we

might be “cutting away a bunch of kids who do not have ac-

cess to internet (T1)”. However, the teachers were willing

to work on accessibility issues—for example, by giving such

students the option to ﬁnish such activities in the library—due

to their strong motivation to better connect to as many parents

as possible.

When asked to tell us how they handed out the cards, it be-

came apparent that all teachers went beyond the deployment

instructions. Instead of just reading the scripted story as sug-

gested, they all used their card to show children a part of

the activity; aiming to get the children more engaged and ex-

cited. Three teachers showed at least a ﬁrst few minutes of the

video; while the kindergarten teacher went through the whole

ﬁrst activity, utilising it as a teaching resource to reinforce the

calming down steps. In all classes, the teachers reported that

children were mostly enthusiastic about the cards and were

looking forward to taking them home.

We asked the teachers to go through the ﬁrst activity as part of

the interview with us, watching their reactions and comments.

In spite of explicit request for critical comments, the activity

elicited mostly positive responses, with the critique focussing

on localised aspects (such as a speciﬁc wording, or a typo in

the text) and pointing out that the mechanism for the follow-

up stories has not been clear enough. The interactive nature of

the parent-child interaction with the story, and the scaffolding

of the experience for both child and the parent were points

that teachers repeatedly mentioned as particularly important.

Children’s experiences

Two of the authors facilitated the child interviews together.

We structured the child groups around watching the activity

on a tablet, using it as a reminder to elicit stories about their

experiences at home. We were particularly interested in who

they played it with, which parts they liked/disliked, and what

they would suggest as improvements. We were not permit-

ted to record the conversations so one of the researchers kept

notes.

Most of the children, regardless of the age, talked about the

enjoyment of receiving something physical that was linked to

a digital game. The need for parental involvement was also

often seen as positive: for example, one child explained how

she “[liked the activity] because you get alone time with your

parents (C8)”. When watching the activity with us, we of-

ten observed that the children huddled together around the

tablet, enjoyed the ‘goofy’ animation, and repeated some of

the characteristic sounds of individual characters (e.g., the Pi-

rate’s ”Arrrgh”). They particularly enjoyed ‘helping Harrdy’

by doing the calming strategies (many recalled trying all three

strategies when doing the activity at home).

When talking about their at-home experiences, most of the

children said they did the activity with another person and

that they enjoyed playing it. Surprisingly, the other person

was not necessarily a parent: approximately a third of the

children shared they played the activity with their sibling in-

stead (either older or younger), often because their parents

were away or too busy. Some of the older kids even took

over the ‘parental’ role during such occasions: For example,

C11 explained how she “ﬁrst played it with her mum [...] but

then also pretended to be an adult for her younger sister”.

Others started alone but then included their siblings or par-

ent when the social interaction was required. In contrast, two

children from the younger end of the age range told us they

went through the activity alone. They were often interested

mainly in the Pirate story and did not partake in any of the off-

screen activities; leading to disappointment with the game.

For example, one of the kindergarten children told us that al-

though his nanny was in the room, he has “played through it

myself just clicking through all the buttons as I didn’t need to

read that. A boring game (C2)”. Some of the children also

mentioned technical issues they experienced that prevented

them, at least initially, from playing. These were often re-

solved with the help from their parents or siblings.

Parental qualitative feedback

While the system indicates that 56 cards were used at least

once, only very few parents volunteered to take part in the

interview or submit a survey: Only one mother signed up for

the phone interview and we received only 13 responses to the

survey.

Initially, we assumed that perhaps the reason for such low

turn-out was that many parents might not know about the

cards at all. To test this, the school counsellor offered to inter-

cept parents in-person when they came to pick up their chil-

dren after school, over a period of 3 days. She was however

able to give out only 4 cards, with most of the other parents

saying they have seen the card and often already played it

with their child; suggesting the probe indeed reached many

parents. However, these efforts did not lead to any increase in

interview volunteers or survey responses. This suggests that

while many parents did engage with the probe itself at home,

we did not manage to incentivise them to provide additional

feedback to the research team.

The one mother who volunteered was very positive about her

experience of the probe; although this is likely affected by the

self-selection bias. Her son, who has impulsivity and other

behaviour issues, brought the card home and initiated the use.

She was surprised he was patient with the story, and had liked

the activity. She herself felt that the activity was a good re-

minder to her to reinforce the calming down skills; she also

referred to the pirate story in the following days, saying things

like “What would the pirate do now to calm down?”. She par-

ticularly liked having a concrete reference for her young son

that was tied to a shared story. She did not realise that she

could return to the activity over the following days.

The majority of the available survey responses came from

parents of the kindergarten class (10 out of 13), with the re-

maining responses being two G1 parents and one G2 parent.

Eleven of the thirteen parents said they played the activity

with their child; one did not know about the activity at all;

and one did not have time. Apart from a single family3, all

children were perceived by the parents as liking the activity

and enthusiastic to try it out. Six of the parents told us the

magnet is still visible in their home, mostly on their fridge;

others either did not know or had thrown it away already.

STUDY 2: MTURK DEPLOYMENT

The second probe deployment aimed to address the remain-

ing two research questions, unpacking if and how the probe

would facilitate emotional experiences (RQ2) and help par-

ents scaffold the appropriate experiential learning context for

the children (RQ3).

We used MTurk to recruit 25 parent-child pairs who would

be willing to have their interaction with the activity recorded

(thus providing the detailed data needed for analysis), and

also were more likely to report their experiences in a post-hoc

survey. In doing so, we draw on the growing body of work

showing the possible insights gained from MTurk collected

data, both at CSCW [31, 32] as well as in other disciplines

such as psychology (e.g., [33]). An additional advantage

of MTurk recruitment was the possibility to also reach low-

income parents and those living outside of principal cities,

who are the key at-risk populations for many SEL curricula,

but are often hard to reach through other methods.

Methods and data collected

To promote a wide uptake, we offered $5 for the 20 minute

long Human Intelligence Task (HIT), placing the HIT among

the higher paid end of MTurk jobs. We thus hoped to attract

also parents who are not personally interested in the topic of

calming down/SEL skills or parenting as such. To improve

chances of high quality results, we required that turkers have

at least 95% prior approval history, live in the US, and have

at least 50 prior accepted HITs [36].

The HIT description asked the participants to ‘play an edu-

cation activity with your child and tell us what you thought

about it.’ We made it clear from the start that the study was

to be completed with their child, aged 5-9. Turkers were also

informed that they would need to download a third party ap-

plication (UserZoom) onto their smart-phone to record their

3The parent told us that “although initially very excited to it, my

child thought it was not very interesting”.

phone screen, what they say, and the camera image. For tech-

nical reasons, we required that participants had access to an

Android phone.

During the HIT, participants went through the ﬁrst Harrdy ac-

tivity together with their child (task 1), and then were asked

to answer questions about their experience such as what they

liked or disliked; what other SE skills they consider impor-

tant, and how are they working on these with their child

(task 2). After we reviewed the HIT, all accepted participants

were invited to take part in a follow-up survey (8min), re-

using the open-ended questions sent to in-school parents. The

survey completion was compensated by a further $2 bonus.

Participants

The MTurk recruitment resulted in a diverse set of 25 partici-

pants, living across 14 different US states. They reported rel-

atively low-income: nearly half (47%) reported yearly house-

hold income as 30k to 50k; and nearly an additional ﬁfth

(17%) reported yearly income under 30k. The participants

lived mostly often in rural areas (42%), or in metropolitan ar-

eas but outside of principal cities (33%). We saw a quite con-

sistent split of grades between Kindergarten and Grade 3, and

a single Grade 4 participant. Approximately 80% of parents

were mothers. Most of our participants were Caucasian par-

ents; this strong under-representation of Afro-American and

Spanish population in the US mirrors results of [33].

Data quality

Overall, we found the data quality very good, with no ob-

vious cheating (e.g., only clicking through or faking the in-

teraction). Due to technical issues with participants’ phones

or internet connection, only 17 videos of the pirate activity

have been uploaded to the server. These recordings were 8:01

minutes long on average (min 5:06, max 9:56 minutes4). For

additional 3 parent-child pairs, we had at least the uploaded

video of the task 2; leaving 5 parent-child pairs with no video.

In these cases, we initially rejected the work, but left the op-

portunity for the parent to contact us if they thought the re-

jection ”was in error”. All but one got back in touch and their

HIT was subsequently accepted. These participants were then

asked to at least ﬁll out the follow-up survey. From the full

sample of 25 accepted participants, 19 ﬁlled out the follow-up

survey.

Data analysis

Our key focus was on the parent-child interactions elicited

by the probe. We drew on Gottman et al. [16, 17] Emo-

tion Coaching framework to theoretically ground the key in-

dicators of parental scaffolding. These included, for exam-

ple: if and how the parent scaffolds the child to become

aware and verbalise their emotion during parent-child inter-

actions around the prompts offered by the activity; whether

they follow-up on such prompts to validate (and further probe

into) child’s feelings; and if and how the parent attempted to

scaffold the learning experience for the child more broadly,

e.g., subtly helping the child if the child seems lost or helping

to rekindle interest if the child loses focus.

4For technical reasons, the UserZoom application stops recording

after 9:56 min. This happened in 3 parent-child pairs, whose inter-

actions thus were, in reality, approximately 2-3 minutes longer.

We also looked at indicators of the engagement of the child

(and parent) with the activity, such as whether they kept focus

on the screen or reacted to the story in non-verbal ways (e.g.,

giggling or mimicking sounds or activities on screen). We an-

notated the collected videos within the UserZoom interface,

both through marking important moments and sub-clips di-

rectly within the video. The resulting observation notes were

then thematically analysed (methodology as per Study 1) to-

gether with the follow-up survey data.

Results

Most children and adults seemed focussed and engaged when

watching the initial video and working with prompts. In par-

ticular, we saw children sitting still or pointing out things to

parents such as ‘look, there’s Harrdy!’ or ‘O-oh!’ when the

monkey snatched the map. We also saw a lot of giggling at

the animation (mirroring the child interviews in schools), and

quick glimpses at the parent to see if they were also enjoy-

ing the story. Children’s and parents’ behaviour towards the

prompts differed across families, but mostly with respect to

age. Many of the older children took pride in trying to read

the text out loud by themselves, with subtle support from the

parent if they got stuck on a word or read something incor-

rectly. The younger children were more reliant on the parent

reading and scaffolding the interaction with prompts.

We saw clear differences between parents around how they

scaffolded the engagement with activity for their child

through their reading style. For example, some parents im-

mediately started using a ‘story voice’ to narrate the story to

the child, facilitating the child’s interest and involvement in

the activity. In contrast, another group of parents started off

reading the text in a ﬂat way. These parents left pauses for

children’s responses, but only rarely followed-up with addi-

tional questions, leading to interactions that appeared much

less engaged, and more like homework. Pragmatically, the

reading style also seemed to depend on the adult comfort with

reading-out-loud – if they struggled with the words them-

selves, it was harder for them to present the content in an

engaging way immediately.

Most of the relevant scaffolding behaviours however ap-

peared when parents and children shifted the attention from

the screen to each other, transforming the activity into a joint

discussion around the prompt. For example, we often saw

the parents read the prompt out-loud (as if making sense of it

for themselves), but then immediately turn to the child and re-

peat the question again in a more direct way. For example, the

adult (M14) was reading out loud “Did you ever have some-

thing taken away from you? How did that make you feel?

Tell your adult. <turning to the child>So tell me, how did

that make you feel when someone took something from you?”.

Many parents seemed to do this naturally from the start; oth-

ers took longer to switch from storytelling mode of reading

out prompts to directly scaffolding the discussion with their

child; but a few never made the switch and read throughout

the activity.

What seemed to particularly help parents turn from story-

reading to scaffolding their child’s thinking about emotions

were the prompts asking for the child’s own experiences

(”how would you feel in this situation?”); especially if these

were then connected back to the story (”so how do you think

Harrdy feels now?”). Such questions also seemed to provoke

the child’s reﬂection and often also the deepest responses

from children. For example, when a child was asked by his

mum whether he had anything grabbed from him, he said

“<calm voice>”Not really ... but if I did, I would be re-

ally really mad. <thinking for 3s, then becoming excited>

Oh yes, Lulu! [...] she took away my bike and it’s mine and I

really really really want to ride it! [Mum: how did that make

you feel?] Really really mad! (M9)”.

Another source of experiential engagement for the children

was enacting the calming down strategies themselves to help

Harrdy (or their adult) to calm down. Approximately half of

the families went through more than one strategy, often all

three. Part of the enjoyment seemed to arise from the funny

pirate voice accompanying the strategies, but also from using

their own body in response to the game. The adult calm-

ing prompt seemed as an enjoyable experience (when adults

played along, as the majority of them did); and a number of

parents skillfully supported their child in going through all

the activities again: e.g., “”I breathe and breathe, but I’m

still angry; what else can I do?” (M3)”.

Some parents also repeatedly took advantage and creatively

built on the prompts to further strengthen the connections

between the story and life. For example, when M18

and her daughter ﬁnished the calming down strategy she

said: “<turning to face her daughter>So when he’s really

angry—or when you’re really angry—you can breathe, right,

to calm yourself down. Or you can count from ten...”. Simi-

larly, one of the questions in task 2 asked parents ‘what other

skills would they like their child to develop’. Interestingly,

this question was also appropriated by a number of parents as

a teaching moment: they often started answering the question

as if talking to the camera (”I would like my child to become

better at ...”), but then quickly turned towards their child ad-

dressed the request directly to him or her (”you see, I’d really

like you to ...”). It seemed that, again, the indirectness and

connection to the story seemed to create a context in which

such requests could be made.

Finally, we saw in the MTurk videos that it was often the

parents who were driving the participation of the child; un-

derstandably so, as the child had not heard about Harrdy

or the activity before. Sometimes, they had obviously ini-

tially struggled to get to child to come and watch the activity;

although, once the video started, children were often capti-

vated.

Follow-up survey data

The follow-up survey included open-ended questions around

the experience with the activity (e.g., ”What particularly

stood out for you about the activity, if anything?”), as well as

explicit prompts to identify what they did not like or would

like to change. There were two problem areas that some par-

ents pointed to: ﬁrst were technical issues such as the slow

loading speed of videos or the recording software for parents

on slow network connections (4 parents); second, some par-

ents felt disappointed they haven’t seen the full story as the

three follow-up stories were not included in the MTurk de-

ployment (5 parents).

Overall, the choice of the topic — calming down strategies —

spoke positively to many parents. Importantly, many parents

highlighted how the cartoon story kept the child engaged, but

also how it presented an example situation they could well

relate to. For example, M5 wrote “What stood out for me was

the way the activity engaged my child and got her to think

about why the character was feeling certain emotions, and

apply that to herself in certain situations.”

Surprisingly, three parents also mentioned in the time be-

tween ﬁnishing the activity and answering the survey (⇠1 or

2 days) either they or their child had already used the strate-

gies in other situations: one parent wrote how she “suggested

to breathe like the pirate” when her daughter was upset about

her bedtime, helping her calm down; another remarked how

her son reminded her to stay calm and breathe when she was

going through an unsettling experience; and ﬁnally the third

shared a story of her younger son, B, instructing his brother to

stay calm (“[...] B walked over there and in a calm, therapist

like voice said ‘You know E, you can take big deep breaths

and count to ten and that will help you to not be mad’.” The

majority of our MTurk child participants did not know the

strategies in advance; however, two children did, which came

as a positive surprise for their parents — supporting the as-

sumptions that many parents are not aware whether and which

SE strategies their child is learning at school.

While such positive responses to the survey corroborate the

observations from the videos, it should be kept in mind that

both are likely affected by self-selection bias (as parents vol-

untarily chose to be part of the study); thus providing a rel-

evant, but likely overly positive sample of how the activity

would be perceived by broader population.

DISCUSSION

The results of the probe deployments provide the ﬁrst steps

towards addressing a key challenge for social-emotional

learning (SEL) curricula: bridging the gap between class-

room learning and at-home reinforcement of skills. True to

the nature of technology probes, this work serves more to

highlight the potential of technology in a novel design space

(and avenues for future work) rather than to present a full

solution. For example, the methodology of current deploy-

ments focussed on understanding the uptake of the probe and

how the parent-child experiential interaction processes could

be scaffolded; rather than evaluation of learning outcomes

achieved by this speciﬁc prototype per se.

In what follows, we unpack what we learned about design

approaches to address the three key constraints: providing

an effective delivery channel (RQ1), facilitating experiential

engagement with the activity (RQ2), and scaffolding of the

parental supporting role (RQ3). We then take a step back and

reﬂect on limitations of this study in the broader context of

using technology in support of SEL.

Suitability of delivery channel (RQ1)

The literature review and expert interviews show that SEL

curricula lack ways to actively engage parents (and children)

with experiential learning at home. The logged data from

the in-the-wild probe deployment suggests that the probe was

reasonably successful in getting into the homes; engaging

46% to 60% of learners. However, the low parent feedback

rate within this deployment complicates our understanding

of how exactly the card was used by parents (and the child)

in the home setting. Still, the interviews with children and

the school-counsellor would suggest that a large proportion

of parents have seen and played the magnet (⇠two thirds

of children from our sample); and that only a few children

played the activity alone (two children from our sample).

Moreover, the MTurk data suggests that at least the MTurk

parents engaged with, and scaffolded the learning for their

children (see also below) while playing the activity.

Overall, this would suggest that the two main design concepts

used by the probe point to promising avenues for future work.

First, drawing on the ‘portal’ metaphor, i.e., combining a

physical object that is sent home and linked to digital content,

seems to ﬁt well existing practices around home-school com-

munication; is easy to distribute for teachers; and was under-

standable to teachers, children, and (we assume) also parents.

At the same time, such portals could plausibly deliver a wide

range of interactive interventions that build on digital devices

already available in homes of the families. Second, relying

on the child’s motivation to try the activity—while requiring

parental support to do so—seems a plausible method of driv-

ing initial parental involvement (e.g., that the parents make

a conscious decision whether to engage or not). In particu-

lar, giving children a game ‘hidden’ in a physical object that

they can try only when they are back at home, seems to have

elicited engagement and motivation across the age ranges we

looked at (K-G3).

Interviews with children have shown that approximately a

third of the learners in the in-the-wild study played the game

with their sibling (as the parent was either away or busy).

This points to an alternative option of engaging the learners at

home: by involving siblings or other family members—rather

than just the parents—into the activity as active participants.

One opportunity for future work might be designing activities

where children work with their (older) sibling to create some-

thing, e.g., a story, which is then shown and explained to the

parent (still as part of the activity).

The probe was also designed to serve as an ambient reminder

that stays visible in the family environment over time, as a

magnetic card on the fridge or other places. The SEL theory

suggests that providing such on-going reminders is crucial for

reinforcement processes. However, we have only limited data

on whether this has been successful in this trial. From the 13

completed survey responses, just under half of the cards were

still posted on the fridge two to three weeks after the deploy-

ment. Though these numbers are somewhat promising, it is

unclear what happened with the magnet in the families who

did not respond to the survey. An important open question is

then to understand how one might design for such long-term

ambient reminders in the context of SEL and families (cf.,

also [37] or [9, p.287] for examples of related CSCW and

HCI work in this space).

Experiential learning (RQ2)

The theory of social-emotional learning is clear that experien-

tial learning situations are needed for meaningful practice and

reinforcement to occur. The results of the probe deployments

suggest the combination of a video and embedded prompts

can create experiential situations similar to the role plays or

puppet stories in class, in spite the lack of trained guidance

normally provided by the teacher. In particular, we used a

common SEL progression to present a story relevant to the

reinforced SEL concept (’get angry when something is taken

away from you’), utilise prompting questions to support the

child’s recall of a related personal experience (’how would

you feel’) and help them imagine the character’s feelings, and

then looping it back into to the story progress with the strate-

gies taught as part of SEL training. This is a promising ﬁrst

step which suggests that a wider range of SEL learning ac-

tivities could be delivered in a similar manner. However, the

child’s experience has been still limited to the tight coupling

with the presented story itself, rather than a real-life ‘hot’ sit-

uation he or she is experiencing; the fundamental goal of SEL

reinforcement.

The key next step for future systems is then to ﬁnd way to

extend the support for the parent and child beyond the video

activity itself, helping them connect the strategies to their ev-

eryday ‘hot’ moments. The parent interview and MTurk sur-

veys showed that four parents have already appropriated the

existing activity in similar way, using a reference to the story

to label the on-going situation and remind about available

strategies. SEL theory suggests such behaviours are likely

to help the child generalise learned skills into other everyday

contexts. While this again shows promise in the potential of

technology-based delivery to promote such on-going engage-

ment, the open question is how to speciﬁcally facilitate such

transfer through design. For example, what are the opportuni-

ties for ‘smart’ objects that could be delivered home together

with the magnetic card, such as a ‘calming down token’ or an

‘anti-anger wand’, helping the child connect the learning with

their everyday interactions? And, what might be the best de-

velopmentally appropriate metaphors to build on, similar to

the ‘treasure hunt’ trope used in the current probe?

Scaffolding of parental scaffolding (RQ3)

The second crucial enabling component within the SE learn-

ing theory is the skillful scaffolding provided to the child by

the adult, in this case the parent. The probe deployment sug-

gests that designing for interdependence between the child

and the adult as part of the activity seems like a promising

direction to facilitate a part of such parental scaffolding: sup-

porting the parent’s active engagement with child’s activity.

In our case, such interdependence created a shared experi-

ence for the child and parent that could be then worked with,

e.g., through the prompts suggested by the activity. While

the current probe only scratched surface of designing for

interdependence—through expecting the adult to narrate the

story—it points to a wide range of opportunities for future

systems (e.g., using multiple devices to drive a single story).

The aim of the carefully selected prompts has been to model

Emotion Coaching-like interaction on part of the parent: ask-

ing for and validating emotional experiences of the child in-

cluding labelling of emotion, providing support when needed

(e.g., through the progression of questions), and promoting

agency and emotional reﬂection on part of the child. The

analysis of the MTurk videos suggests that this approach

is promising. We saw that the most engaging and well-

scaffolded interactions happened when parents and children

turned away from the screen, building on the shared experi-

ence provided by the activity to have a dialog with each other.

In such instances, the parents used the pre-prepared prompts

as an opportunity to be elaborated on: either by asking the

child for more detail about their experiences, or by bringing in

their own agenda (such as strengthening the connections be-

tween what is learned within the story and real-life use). This

opens questions around the methods to scaffold the parental

role in a way that is not too tightly bound to the story/activity

itself, but rather designed to help the parent to use the story

and the embedded prompts as examples that can creatively

appropriated to scaffold interactions ‘outside of the phone’.

Limitations and novel design opportunities

The series of studies reported here form a ﬁrst important step

into this design space. We now point to several open ques-

tions that have not been addressed here and that invite follow-

up work.

SEL expert vs. parent perspectives

The work has been so far focused mainly on understanding

the SEL expert perspective: starting from identifying chal-

lenges address-able by technology; to designing a system that

complements existing curricula and ﬁts with what the SEL

experts consider to be best-practices in the ﬁeld. This pro-

vided us with the opportunity to directly work with key ex-

perts who have many years experience in developing SEL

curricula used by millions of students and to directly draw

on the existing SEL literature and theory, which is mostly

curricula focussed.

However, such expert-centric approach needs to be comple-

mented by in-depth participatory research with parents to val-

idate if and how their perspective matches that of SEL ex-

perts. In particular, future work should aim to more deeply

understand the key reasons behind some parents’ existing

lack of engagement with SEL. The SEL literature—and in-

terviews with SEL experts and teachers here—would suggest

that one of the key reasons is the lack of time (and overload

with school materials). The full issue is however likely to

be more complex and might depend on cultural background,

socio-economic status, and multiple other aspects. More thus

needs to be learned about the existing practices of how fami-

lies communicate around SEL at home (and with school); the

underlying parental beliefs and motivation; and the support

that parents already provide their children around SE skills.

Drawing on the longitudinal work by Gottman’s et al. [17]

can be a good starting point to understand what is known

about parenting in these aspects, but should be complemented

with established participatory methods within HCI.

Complex ethical space

Designing social-emotional learning interventions, whether

at home or school, form a complex ethical space. By scoping

the research as based on SEL experts perspective and curric-

ula, this paper has side-stepped a number of important ques-

tions that will need to be critically examined as future work

in this space emerges. In particular, we should be mindful of

the possible tensions between expert knowledge and parents’

approaches to parenting; the distribution of power in the ed-

ucational space, especially as seen by lower socio-economic

status families; as well as key discussions about what does

‘supporting the well-being of children’ mean, for whom, and

who should make decisions. Existing work in CSCW and

HCI in similarly complex settings such as healthcare [14] or

persuasive computing more broadly [46] can serve as starting

points for examination of these aspects.

Evaluating learning

This work has focused on exploring the potential of tech-

nology to enable important parent-child interactions that are

needed for social-emotional learning to occur (cf., RQ1-3)

but are seen as hard to establish at home with existing SEL

methods. The deployments have, however, not aimed to test

whether the scaffolded interactions lead to actual learning

outcomes for the child or the parent.

Any such evaluation should distinguish between evaluating

the success of the delivery channel (i.e., has the information

reached the parents at all and has system scaffolded the rele-

vant kind of parent-child interactions?); and whether the de-

livered content was psychologically powerful (i.e., have the

interactions lead to lasting changes in parents’ or child’s be-

haviour?). While the former is more easily detectable during

the deployment (e.g., through the methods used here such as

logging or recording of interactions), evaluating the psycho-

logical effects of the interventions require speciﬁc experimen-

tal methodology that is applicable in-the-wild deployments:

Quasi-experimental studies or Randomised Controlled Tri-

als are the most common approaches (cf., [12, 42]). Coyle

et al. [8] and Slovak and Fitzpatrick [43] recommend a two-

stage approach to such evaluations, where the initial evalua-

tion are ran by HCI researchers to establish that the systems

are likely to lead to positive outcomes, but the needed large

scale experimental evaluations are progressively led by SEL

experts.

Existing SEL literature also provides well-tested indicators

of SEL interventions outcomes e.g., see [10] or [11, chp.19].

These include methods such as speciﬁc behavioural tasks,

questionnaires, real-world indicators such as academic out-

come or lowered behavioural issues, or established coding

systems for a detailed analysis of subsequent natural parent-

child interactions.

CONCLUSIONS

This paper presents the ﬁrst exploration into the role digital

technology could play in bridging the home-school barrier in

the context of SEL curricula. We draw on an interview study

with SEL experts, representing major SEL curricula providers

in US, to identify the key challenges in and learning princi-

ples that need to be supported for SEL reinforcement to take

place – the reliance on active, experiential learning as well

as the importance of scaffolding the parents’ scaffolding role.

Through the design and deployment of a technology probe in

two complementing contexts, we gathered a nuanced under-

standing of how technology-based interventions might reach

out and engage parents, as well as help them to scaffold learn-

ing experiences that reinforce their children’s SEL skills at

home. Overall, our ﬁndings point to the potential of digital

technology to support parent-child interactions that can rein-

force social-emotional learning, providing an important ﬁrst

step for future research in this direction.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Blind for review.

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Desk workers may often experience more negative than positive emotions in office settings, making emotion regulation (ER) crucial for their mental health. Squeezable interfaces have shown the potential to reduce anxiety and stress in digital and non-digital ER. However, few studies have explored how they can be leveraged to provide tangible and embodied support for workplace ER. We interviewed five mental health experts and 16 desk workers and conducted five co-design workshops with 17 desk workers, aiming to understand how validated practices can be integrated into squeezable interfaces and how they should be designed to support ER and accommodate diverse needs in the context of the workplace. This study contributes to digital ER by identifying design opportunities for squeezable interfaces and by outlining design considerations and challenges for tangible and embodied interactions in ER support within the workplace. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI; • Social and professional topics → Socio-technical systems.

Designing Daily Supports for Parent-Child Conversations about Emotion: Ecological Momentary Assessment as Intervention

Preprint

Full-text available

Apr 2025

Parental emotion coaching approaches that advocate for noticing and validating child emotions can greatly impact children's regulatory abilities. However, in daily life, parents often struggle to apply emotion coaching strategies that they access through par-enting programmes or online help, suggesting a need for in situ support. This paper explores a potential new avenue for providing such support. We undertook conceptual work to develop a set of emotion-focused reflective questions that could increase parents' attention to child emotions and delivered these as daily ecological momentary assessments (EMAs). We investigated the perceived impact of the approach through a 2-week online trial (n=33) and then co-designed child-facing component with parents through a 4-week asynchronous remote community study (n=15). Our paper contributes (1) conceptual insights on designing a potential novel intervention approach, (2) empirical insights on its acceptability and perceived impacts for parents, and (3) design implications for applying the approach to wider psychological constructs.

"It Explains What I am Currently Going Through Perfectly to a Tee": Understanding User Perceptions on LLM-Enhanced Narrative Interventions

Preprint

Full-text available

Sep 2024

Stories about overcoming personal struggles can effectively illustrate the application of psychological theories in real life, yet they may fail to resonate with individuals' experiences. In this work, we employ large language models (LLMs) to create tailored narratives that acknowledge and address unique challenging thoughts and situations faced by individuals. Our study, involving 346 young adults across two settings, demonstrates that LLM-enhanced stories were perceived to be better than human-written ones in conveying key takeaways, promoting reflection, and reducing belief in negative thoughts. These stories were not only seen as more relatable but also similarly authentic to human-written ones, highlighting the potential of LLMs in helping young adults manage their struggles. The findings of this work provide crucial design considerations for future narrative-based digital mental health interventions, such as the need to maintain relatability without veering into implausibility and refining the wording and tone of AI-enhanced content.

EMooly: Supporting Autistic Children in Collaborative Social-Emotional Learning with Caregiver Participation through Interactive AI-infused and AR Activities

Article

Nov 2024

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have social-emotional deficits that lead to difficulties in recognizing emotions as well as understanding and responding to social interactions. This study presents EMooly, a tablet game that actively involves caregivers and leverages augmented reality (AR) and generative AI (GenAI) to enhance social-emotional learning for autistic children. Through a year of collaborative effort with five domain experts, we developed EMooly that engages children through personalized social stories, interactive and fun activities, and enhanced caregiver participation, focusing on emotion understanding and facial expression recognition. Compared with a baseline, a controlled study with 24 autistic children and their caregivers showed EMooly significantly improved children's emotion recognition skills and its novel features were preferred and appreciated. EMooly demonstrates the potential of AI and AR in enhancing social-emotional development for autistic children via prompt personalizing and engagement, and highlights the importance of caregiver involvement for optimal learning outcomes.

"Actually I Can Count My Blessings": User-Centered Design of an Application to Promote Gratitude Among Young Adults

Article

Nov 2024

Regular practice of gratitude has the potential to enhance psychological wellbeing and foster stronger social connections among young adults. However, there is a lack of research investigating user needs and expectations regarding gratitude-promoting applications. To address this gap, we employed a user-centered design approach to develop a mobile application that facilitates gratitude practice. Our formative study involved 20 participants who utilized an existing application, providing insights into their preferences for organizing expressions of gratitude and the significance of prompts for reflection and mood labeling after working hours. Building on these findings, we conducted a deployment study with 26 participants using our custom-designed application, which confirmed the positive impact of structured options to guide gratitude practice and highlighted the advantages of passive engagement with the application during busy periods. Our study contributes to the field by identifying key design considerations for promoting gratitude among young adults.

LESCA: Scaffolding and its impact on the higher cognitive levels and emotions of the student

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2024
J UNIVERS COMPUT SCI

Teaching technical content in science and engineering requires the development of high-level competencies such as analytical and critical thinking skills, and is perceived by students as a difficult subject to understand. One way to help students learn this type of content is through the use of scaffolding, which dynamically regulates and adjusts learning according to the student’s needs. Although the use of scaffolding has already been applied in different educational contexts, so far there are no studies analysing its impact on students’ emotions and perception. In this paper we propose the LESCA system, which performs adaptive content feedback through scaffolding. The main hypothesis of this article is that the use of this tool together with teacher scaffolding improves the acquisition of content at higher cognitive levels and improves the student’s emotional state during learning. An experience has been carried out with 36 students of Industrial Electronics and Robotics Associate Degree with a pre-post design, where one group of students did not use the tool and another one did. The findings indicate that knowledge acquisition at the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy improved after the use of technological scaffolding and that this acquisition improved significantly when incorporating teacher scaffolding. On the other hand, students who performed the tasks with the system experienced significantly less anxiety and despair than students who did not use it. In addition, it has been found that students perceive teacher scaffolding to be significantly more useful than technological scaffolding.

Parent-Child Joint Media Engagement Within HCI: A Scoping Analysis of the Research Landscape

Conference Paper

May 2024

"They Don't Come With a Handbook": Exploring Design Opportunities for Supporting Parent-Child Interaction around Emotions in the Family Context

Article

Apr 2024

Parenting practices have a profound effect on children's well-being and are a core target of several psychological interventions for child mental health. However, there is only limited understanding in HCI so far about how to design socio-technical systems that could support positive shifts in parent-child social practices in situ. This paper focuses on parental socialisation of emotion as an exemplar context in which to explore this question. We present a two-step study, combining theory-driven identification of plausible design directions with co-design workshops with 22 parents of children aged 6-10 years. Our data suggest the potential for technology-enabled systems that aim to facilitate positive changes in parent-child social practices in situ, and highlight a number of plausible design directions to explore in future work.

School-family partnerships: Fostering children’s school success

Book

Jan 2005

Eva N Patrikakou

Spaceship Launch: Designing a Collaborative Exergame for Families

Conference Paper

Feb 2015

Parents play a critical role in facilitating children's physical activity, as they are an important source of modeling and support. While Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers have explored exergame design for children or adults separately, an important open area of work is identifying design guidelines for family exergames. One question that researchers have increasingly posed is, how can exergames be designed to avoid potential negative consequences of competition? To address these questions we designed Spaceship Launch, an exergame for parents and kids in lower income neighborhoods, where obesity is most prevalent. We describe our iterative design process: the formative study to identify design opportunities, our resulting system, and our field evaluation of the tool. Our findings highlight the impact of SL on physical activity intentions, and how parental preferences for in-game competition were aligned with the psychological needs of relatedness and competence. We conclude with design recommendations for future family-focused exergames.

Structuring, Aggregating, and Evaluating Crowdsourced Design Critique

Conference Paper

Feb 2015

Feedback is an important component of the design process, but gaining access to high-quality critique outside a classroom or firm is challenging. We present CrowdCrit, a web-based system that allows designers to receive design critiques from non-expert crowd workers. We evaluated CrowdCrit in three studies focusing on the designer's experience and benefits of the critiques. In the first study, we compared crowd and expert critiques and found evidence that aggregated crowd critique approaches expert critique. In a second study, we found that designers who got crowd feedback perceived that it improved their design process. The third study showed that designers were enthusiastic about crowd critiques and used them to change their designs. We conclude with implications for the design of crowd feedback services.

Exiting the Design Studio

Conference Paper

Feb 2015

Online collaboration tools enable developers of interactive systems to quickly reach potential users for usability testing. Can these technologies serve designers who seek feedback on user needs during the earliest stages of design? Online needfinding may help designers create products and services that can target a more diverse user population. To explore this, we conducted a feasibility study to compare face-to-face methods with online needfinding sessions. We found that video can sufficiently capture nuanced reactions to preliminary concept storyboards, but that feedback providers need guidance and structure. We then introduce a tool for collecting early-stage design feedback from online participants and conduct a case study with a professional design team. The team conducted needfinding activities with local participants, as well as a cost-equivalent number of online participants The case study demonstrates that combining online crowdsourcing with a video survey tool provides a simple and cost-efficient way to collect early-stage feedback.

Educating people to be emotionally and socially intelligent

Article

Dec 2003

Reuven Bar-On

Mobile Technology for Children

Book

Jan 2009

A. Druin

With the goal of improving the design of mobile technology for children, On the Move brings together contributions from HCI leaders in research, and industry, and technology and education based policy experts to analyze and evaluate and present solutions. To show readers how they can apply each design problem and case study to their HCI professional or academic work, each chapter will contain best practice advice. In HCI, social implications, in addition to interface design, usability, and performance, are all part of an informed design solution. Chauncey Wilson, Senior User Researcher, Autodesk, Inc., and forthcoming MK author, states, "The design of mobile devices is not an algorithmic process, it is must be considered in a social context that examines culture, changing trends, and other factors. This proposal provides a solid foundation of the social and cultural factors that are critical in the design of mobile products for children." There are many technological solutions to consider, many contexts to explore user scenarios and many goals for supporting learning. It contains the work of 43 authors from 9 countries, each deeply invested in improving and analyzing design of childrens mobile products. These authors have diverse points of view, but it is a subject that deserves debate. The trends, design and use of these products has been both lauded and criticized, and the debate is far from over. The need has never been greater for an evaluation of the design and the affects of the design mobile technology as it pertains to children's products and learning - the good and the bad - especially for and by the people who conduct research, develop and design the products. * First book to present a multitude of voices on the design, technology, and impact of mobile devices for children and learning * Features contributions from leading academics, designers, and policy makers from nine countries, whose affiliations include Sesame Workshop, LeapFrog Enterprises, Intel, the United Nations, and UNICEF * Each contribution and case study is followed by a best practice overview to help readers consider their own research and design and for a quick reference.

Social and Emotional Learning in Schools: From Programs to Strategies

Article

Dec 2012
Soc Pol Rep

Persuasive technology and moral responsibility: Toward an ethical framework for persuasive technologies

Article

Jan 2006

P.P. Verbeek

The unconscious mind

Article

Jan 2003

S. Gardner

INTRODUCTION: The concept of the unconscious is now associated so firmly with Sigmund Freud that an alternative conception of the unconscious, one which is not in some way dependent on or derived from that of psychoanalysis, is hard to imagine. Yet, as studies of the prehistory of psychoanalysis emphasise, by no means did Freud introduce the concept from scratch: already by 1900, when Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) appeared, the unconscious was a well-established intellectual topic (the classic studies of psychoanalysis’s ancestry are Ellenberger 1970 and Whyte 1979; see also Brandell 1979: ch. 8, Decker 1977: ch. 9, and Ellenberger 1993: chs. 1–2; Freud’s debts are acknowledged in Jones 1953: I, 435–6). Throughout the period 1870 to 1914 the concept of the unconscious was, however, in comparison with its psychoanalytic version, indeterminate in several respects. This reflects its deep involvement with two broader issues in later nineteenth-century philosophy, namely the disentangling of psychology as an autonomous discipline from philosophy, and the opposition between ascendant materialistic naturalism and the contrary impulse to preserve something of the metaphysical systems which had dominated the first three decades of the century (for a different suggestion as to why the unconscious appeared in Western thought, see Foucault 1966 [1974: 326–7]). © Cambridge University Press 2003 and Cambridge University Press, 2008.

In Situ Cues for ADHD Parenting Strategies Using Mobile Technology

Article

Jul 2014

Parenting is always demanding, but families coping with neurodevelopmental disorders, such as ADHD, experience unique challenges. To address these challenges, research in the area of Parental Behavioral Therapy is accelerating. This type of therapy focuses on behavioral strategies that, if practiced regularly, can have a positive impact on the child's long-term behavior, as well as a reduction in parental stress. While these strategies are simple, there are hurdles to putting them into practice. First, parents often struggle with their own-often-undiagnosed-mental health challenges. Second, due to the needs of their children, parents are under immense stress in addition to regular, daily life stresses. Our work explores how to monitor parental stress and offers in situ support to remind parents of behavioral strategies to practice in moments of duress. We gained insight into how to design for the dynamics of families with ADHD children by using a prototype of our system as a probe. Our goal was to bring to the forefront simple strategies that can positively impact family ties and enhance the wellbeing of the child. We present results that suggest that when interventions are cued during moments of duress, technology might prove useful in supporting behavioral therapy.

Scaffolding the scaffolding: Supporting children-s social-emotional learning at home

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