Young Children’s Science Learning from Narrative Books: The Role of Text Cohesion and Caregivers’ Extratextual Talk

ABSTRACT

One way to support young children’s factual learning is through shared book reading (reading books with a knowledgeable other). Many books that teach factual content are narrative in structure, in which factual content is embedded within a fictional storyline. However, there are gaps in our understanding of factors influencing children’s factual learning from narrative books. In this experiment, 38 caregivers and their 4- to 5-year-old children from the Southeastern United States participated. Each caregiver read to their child two narrative books on science concepts. The books varied in their levels of cohesion (e.g. drawing connections between textual elements and providing details and comparisons). We coded caregivers’ extratextual talk while reading for the extent to which it emphasized science information (informational highlighted talk) or went beyond the text to provide further related information (informational elaborative talk). Children’s recall of the books’ science and story content was tested in free and probed recall formats. We found that children had higher recall of the story content, even though caregivers emphasized the science content through their highlighted extratextual talk. Caregivers used more elaborative extratextual talk with the low cohesion book, perhaps as compensation for the book’s lack of cohesion. However, children’s recall of the science content was most strongly predicted by the books’ cohesion and caregivers’ highlighted extratextual talk. These results emphasize the important role that books’ textual features and caregivers’ extratextual talk during book reading have on young children’s factual learning from narrative books.

Acknowledgments

We give special appreciation to Britney Del Solar, Laura O’Hanlon, Jelena Pejic, and Rachel Shanahan, for help with transcriptions and coding as well as to other members of the Memory at Emory laboratory for their contributions to various stages of this research. We also thank the children and caregivers who participated in this research. Aspects of this work were presented at the 74^th Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation award # 1911639 and Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development award # F32 HD100176-02 to Hilary E. Miller-Goldwater.