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The Role of Adult Language in Enhancing Children’s Early Learning

 

Across several studies, I have found that subtle cues children are attending to such as the language in their conversations and shared storybook reading interactions with adults have implications for their social inferences and learning preferences, beliefs about intelligence as well as their persistence during a challenging task.

 

In the science domain, I have investigated how children’s conversations (question-explanation exchanges) with adults guide their understanding of complex scientific phenomena that cannot be directly observed such as electricity or Coronavirus (Haber, Kumar, Puttre, Dashoush & Corriveau, 2022). Such conversations create opportunities for children to ask causal (often "why" and “how”) questions about the world (e.g., “why do we have clouds in the sky?”), encouraging adults to offer scientific explanations that provide information regarding causal mechanisms aimed at guiding children’s learning (Haber, Conner, Gutwill, Allen & Corriveau, under review). Importantly, adults’ developmentally appropriate, high-quality explanations are rare in everyday conversations and vary in the extent to which they facilitate children’s learning.

 

I have designed and conducted experimental and intervention research aimed at exploring how storybooks can be an effective, strengths-based tool for encouraging adult-child scientific talk and fostering children’s critical thinking and scientific skills:

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• When caregiver-child dyads read a story about a famous scientist’s struggles (compared to a story only emphasizing achievement), children endorsed more of a growth mindset and persisted longer on an impossible task (Haber, Kumar & Corriveau, 2021; Haber, Kumar, Leech & Corriveau, under review).

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• Embedding scientific explanations into a storybook about electricity led to greater scientific caregiver-child discourse and fostered children’s STEM learning in a museum context (Leech, Haber, Jalkh & Corriveau, 2020).

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• Building on the cultural practices of families who have often been underrepresented in research, I am investigating how scientific storybooks embedded with explanations about electricity can further scaffold caregiver-child conversation and children’s STEM learning at the home setting (Haber, Leech & Corriveau, in prep).

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Children’s Early Learning From Technological Sources of Information

 

Although children may direct questions to adult learning partners, children growing up in the digital age are exposed to and actively use technological sources such as the internet, social robots and smart speakers (e.g., Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa) to acquire new knowledge.

 

Whereas interacting with the internet requires the ability to read, children can interact with smart speakers directly in similar ways as with human informants, primarily acquiring information through asking questions.

 

In this line of work, I examine how children learn from and evaluate information provided by such devices (Haber & Corriveau, 2023):

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• I have designed and conducted experiments exploring children’s decisions to pose questions to a smart speaker or human informant such as the child’s classroom teacher (Haber et al., in prep).

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Teacher-Child Scientific Conversations (Question-Response Exchanges) Support Child’s Early Science Learning

 

The language in conversations (question-explanation exchanges) with caregivers and teachers serves as a powerful mechanism for children’s early scientific knowledge acquisition and is a potential malleable factor that can mitigate disparities in school readiness skills prior to the onset of formal schooling.

 

• Linking my first and second lines of work, I have explored how variation in early childhood educators’ responses to children’s scientific questions and language during shared scientific book reading interactions may have the potential to enhance or diminish children’s engagement, interest and learning in STEM activities (Haber, McNally & Corriveau, in prep).

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• I have employed survey methodologies to examine how teachers’ beliefs about knowledge and understanding of science relate to their pedagogical approach to engaging in conversations with children (Haber, Leech, Benton, Dashoush & Corriveau, 2021).

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• Utilizing naturalistic classroom data, my colleagues and I found that teachers are more likely to direct scientific questions to boys rather than girls in a preschool classroom. These data highlight one way in which girls may receive different messages than boys about how to approach science as early as the preschool years (Kumar, Haber & Corriveau, under review).

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School Curricula Foster Children’s Critical and Scientific Thinking Skills in the Classroom

 

Children’s question-asking behavior, a significant 21st century empirical reasoning skill, is a component of  “scientific inquiry,” which has become the foundation of STEM education during formal schooling, as outlined in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS, 2013) and the Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC, 2012).

 

Inquiry-based learning draws on children’s intrinsic motivation to learn about the world by guiding them to identify gaps in their knowledge, encouraging them to ask questions, explore, construct explanations, and collaborate with others, offering a developmentally appropriate way to engage children in STEM activities.

 

• I have utilized naturalistic longitudinal classroom data and experimental methodologies, to investigate how classrooms emphasizing such scientific inquiry-based practices may shape teacher-child scientific conversations and critical thinking skills during the preschool and early elementary school years. I argue that the language in social interactions in the classroom context may provide the foundation for children’s later motivation, and interest in STEM (Haber, Puttre, Ghossainy, & Corriveau, 2021; Puttre, Haber, Ghossainy, & Corriveau, under review; Haber, Sobel & Weisberg, 2019)​.

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