CRII: CHS: Making Universally Usable Technologies to Enhance Parent-Child Co-Reading and Early Literacy Skills at Home

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This project will study how technology can better support early literacy skills for children. Research has shown that children can learn important skills when parents read with them at home, but children from low income families or families where one parent has a disability often enter kindergarten far behind their peers. To give these children more equal access to literacy, this study will work with blind parents from low-income families to create new reading technologies for use with children. This research is important because one in seven Americans has "below basic" literacy skills, a fact which threatens our national security and economic prosperity. This project will study parent-child co-reading experiences with a focus on enhancing "extra-textual" interactions, as when a father asks his child a question about a storybook plot and the child responds by pointing to pictures on the page. Interactive technology presents new opportunities to scaffold these important extra-textual interactions towards achieving "reading readiness" for all children. Taking a participatory, universal usability approach to design, solutions will be developed primarily with and for blind parents who co-read with their sighted children. Follow-up investigations will probe the potential for these solutions to extend benefits to broader populations. Project outcomes will include an inclusive phenomenological model of co-reading, and a technology prototype for domestic settings..This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.