Building Meaningful Parasocial Relationships Between Toddlers and Media Characters to Teach Early Mathematical Skills

Abstract

Very young children have difficulty transferring what they view onscreen to their offscreen worlds. This study examined whether familiarizing toddlers with a character would improve toddlers' performance on a subsequent seriation task. Toddlers were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: (1) a familiarized character condition where toddlers viewed character-based videos and engaged in character-based play over a 3-month period before viewing the seriation video demonstration; (2) an unfamiliarized character condition where the toddler only saw the seriation video demonstration; and (3) a no-exposure control group where the toddler did not see the seriation video demonstration or have any involvement with the character. All toddlers were tested on the same seriation task at age 21 months, with the familiarized character group beginning the study at age 18 months and the other groups participating only at age 21 months. Toddlers in the familiarized character condition, but not the unfamiliarized character condition, completed the seriation task significantly better than the no-exposure control group. Within the familiarized character condition, toddlers who nurtured the character during play subsequently had higher seriation scores. The results suggest that meaningful relationships with media characters can help toddlers learn early mathematical skills.

Notes

This research was supported by NSF grant #0126014 to Sandra L. Calvert at the Children's Digital Media Center at Georgetown University where this research was conducted. We thank the parents and children who participated in this research; Christine Baker, Monica Perrigino, Maggie Girard, Courtney Kent, Brian Borromeo, and Alessandra Caruso for their assistance in data collection and coding; Dr. Rusan Chen for assisting with statistical analyses; and Miss Sing-Ju Chang, Chief Executive of the Hsin Yi Foundation, for providing materials for this project.

1. One child was replaced because of excessive fussiness during testing.

2. Only one toddler lined up her cups instead of nesting them, however, and the highest of her two scores (the nesting score) was used in the seriation analyses.

3. Although the third play session occurred after seriation testing, this order was followed to keep the procedure for seriation assessment constant across all three conditions.