Supporting Children's School Readiness.

A Randomised Control Trial to Test the Effect of Parents' Inference-eliciting Questions During Shared Book Reading on 4-year-olds' Listening Comprehension

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

Study Overview

• Status: Completed
• Conditions: Language Development
• Intervention / Treatment: Behavioral: Language comprehension intervention; Behavioral: Counting intervention

Detailed Description

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

• Study Type: Interventional
• Enrollment (Actual): 100
• Phase: Not Applicable

Contacts and Locations

Study Locations

• United Kingdom
  • South Yorkshire
    • Sheffield, South Yorkshire, United Kingdom, S10 2TN
      • University of Sheffield

Participation Criteria

Eligibility Criteria

• Ages Eligible for Study: 4 years to 4 years (Child)
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers: Yes
• Genders Eligible for Study: All

Description

Inclusion Criteria:

Children are:

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

Exclusion Criteria:

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

Study Plan

How is the study designed?

Design Details

• Primary Purpose: Basic Science
• Allocation: Randomized
• Interventional Model: Parallel Assignment
• Masking: Triple

Number of Arms

2

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm	Intervention / Treatment
Experimental: Language comprehension intervention; The intervention will run for 4 weeks. Caregivers will be provided with storybooks (e.g., Percy the Park Keeper) that have been amended to include inference-eliciting questions. Caregivers will be trained (with a video) to ask these questions and respond to their children's answers during shared reading sessions. They will be asked to read one book per day. Caregivers will keep a reading diary.	Behavioral: Language comprehension intervention
Active Comparator: Counting intervention; The intervention will run for 4 weeks. Caregivers will be provided with a book 'At home with counting' that is made up of age appropriate maths exercises. Caregivers will trained (with a video) to work through one page of the book per day. This should take the same amount of time as the activity in the language intervention condition. Caregivers will keep a counting diary.	Behavioral: Counting intervention

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure	Measure Description	Time Frame
Change after 4 weeks in children's ability to answer inference questions.	An age-appropriate test of inferencing ability has been developed for this study including vignettes developed by the Language and Reading Research Consortium. Children listen to short vignettes and are then asked questions that require them to make local and global inferences based on the information in the stories.	Baseline: when child is 4 years 3 months. Post test: 4 weeks post intervention

Secondary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure	Measure Description	Time Frame
Change in NFER baseline assessment	This is an age appropriate test of maths and language ability.	Baseline: when child is 4 years 3 months - 4 years 6 months. Post test: 4 weeks post intervention

Collaborators and Investigators

• Sponsor: University of Sheffield
• Collaborators: University of Leeds
• Investigators: Principal Investigator: Danielle E Matthews, PhD, University of Sheffield; Principal Investigator: Catherine Davies, PhD, University of Leeds

Study record dates

Study Major Dates

• Study Start (Actual): August 10, 2016
• Primary Completion (Actual): March 20, 2018
• Study Completion (Actual): March 22, 2018

Study Registration Dates

• First Submitted: July 27, 2016
• First Submitted That Met QC Criteria: August 2, 2016
• First Posted (Estimate): August 3, 2016

Study Record Updates

• Last Update Posted (Actual): May 4, 2018
• Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria: May 1, 2018
• Last Verified: May 1, 2018

More Information

Terms related to this study

• Keywords: Language Development; Preschoolers; Shared Picture Book reading; Inference making
• Other Study ID Numbers: R/139470-11-1-INFERENCE

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

• Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?: YES
• IPD Plan Description: Yes. IPD will be archived in accordance with the guidelines and protocol of the University of Sheffield, the UK Data Archive and the ESRC's Research Data Policy. With parents' permission, data will be made available in a timely manner, after outcomes have been published together with appropriate metadata in line with ESRC policy around data archiving.