Developing Conversational Videos to Support Children's STEM Learning and Engagement

开发对话视频以支持儿童的 STEM 学习和参与

• 批准号: 2115382
• 负责人: Mark Warschauer
• 金额: $ 300万
• 依托单位: University of California-Irvine
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-09-15 至 2026-08-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2115382&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Developing; Conversational; Videos; Support; Children

Early childhood is a critical time for developing foundational knowledge, skills, and interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). For that reason, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) places a great priority on developing early childhood STEM content, especially through its television shows that are watched by over 60% of young children in the United States. Research suggests that adding in-the-moment interaction to television watching promotes learning and engagement. Toward this end, researchers from the University of California, Irvine and PBS KIDS have prototyped interactive versions of science shows that children view on internet-connected devices while they communicate with the main character powered by an AI conversational agent. Pilot studies show that when children watch these new interactive videos with the main character pausing periodically to ask probing questions about the learning goals of the episode and following up with appropriate responses, they are more engaged and learn more about science, with heightened benefits for children who speak languages other than English at home. Based on these early results, in this Innovations in Development project the research team will develop, test and produce publicly available conversational episodes for two PBS KIDS television shows, one focused on science and the other on computational thinking. The project will iteratively study and develop six conversational videos with novel forms of support for children, including extended back-and-forth conversation that builds upon a child's responses, visual scaffolding that facilitates verbal communication, and bilingual language processing so that children can answer in English or Spanish. The conversational videos will be evaluated in both lab-based and home settings. The lab-based study will involve 600 children ages 3-7 in a predominantly low-income Latino community in Southern California, in which researchers compare children’s learning and engagement when watching the conversational videos with three other formats: (1) watching the non-interactive broadcast version of the video; (2) watching the video with pseudo-interaction, in which the main character asks questions and gives a generic response after a fixed amount of time but can’t understand what the child says; or (3) watching the broadcast version of the video with a human co-viewer who pauses the video and asks questions. The home-based study will involve 80 families assigned to watch either the non-interactive or interactive videos as many times as they want over a month at home. In both the lab-based and home studies, pre- and post-tests will be used to examine the impact of video watching on science and language learning, and log data will be used to assess children’s verbalization and engagement while watching. Following the home study, the six videos will be further refined and made available for free to the public through the PBS KIDS apps and website, which are visited by more than 13 million users a month. Beyond providing engaging science learning opportunities to children throughout the country, this study will yield important insights into the design, usability, feasibility, and effectiveness of incorporating conversational agents into children’s STEM-oriented video content, with implications for extending this innovation to other educational media such as e-books, games, apps, and toys.This Innovations in Development project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to (a) advance new approaches to and evidence-based understanding of the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments; (b) provide multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences; (c) advance innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments; and (d) engage the public of all ages in learning STEM in informal environments.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.

幼儿期是发展科学、技术、工程和数学 (STEM) 基础知识、技能和兴趣的关键时期。因此，公共广播服务 (PBS) 非常重视开发幼儿 STEM 内容，特别是通过其电视节目，美国 60% 以上的幼儿都会观看该节目。研究表明，在观看电视的过程中添加即时互动可以促进学习和参与。 为此，来自加州大学欧文分校和 PBS KIDS 的研究人员制作了科学展示的交互式版本原型，孩子们在与人工智能对话代理支持的主角进行交流时，会在联网设备上观看。试点研究表明，当孩子们观看这些新的互动视频时，主角会定期停下来询问有关该剧集的学习目标的探究性问题，并随后做出适当的回答，他们会更加投入并了解更多科学知识，这对于在家说英语以外语言的孩子来说有更大的好处。基于这些早期结果，在这个开发创新项目中，研究团队将为 PBS KIDS 的两档电视节目开发、测试和制作公开的对话剧集，其中一档侧重于科学，另一档侧重于计算思维。该项目将迭代研究和开发六个对话视频，为儿童提供新颖的支持形式，包括基于儿童反应的长期来回对话、促进口头交流的视觉支架，以及使儿童能够用英语或西班牙语回答的双语语言处理。对话视频将在实验室和家庭环境中进行评估。这项基于实验室的研究将涉及南加州一个主要是低收入拉丁裔社区的 600 名 3-7 岁儿童，其中研究人员比较了儿童在观看对话视频与其他三种格式时的学习情况和参与度：(1) 观看视频的非交互式广播版本； （2）观看伪交互视频，主角提出问题，并在一定时间后给出笼统的回答，但听不懂孩子在说什么； (3) 与人类共同观看者一起观看视频的广播版本，该观看者暂停视频并提出问题。这项以家庭为基础的研究将涉及 80 个家庭，他们被分配在一个月内在家观看非交互式或交互式视频，次数不限。在实验室和家庭研究中，前测试和后测试将用于检查视频观看对科学和语言学习的影响，日志数据将用于评估儿童在观看时的言语和参与度。家庭研究结束后，这六个视频将进一步完善，并通过 PBS KIDS 应用程序和网站免费向公众开放，每月有超过 1300 万用户访问这些应用程序和网站。除了为全国儿童提供引人入胜的科学学习机会外，这项研究还将对将对话代理纳入儿童面向 STEM 的视频内容的设计、可用性、可行性和有效性产生重要见解，并将这一创新扩展到电子书、游戏、应用程序和玩具等其他教育媒体。该创新发展项目由推进非正式 STEM 学习 (AISL) 计划资助，该计划旨在 (a) 推进 在非正式环境中设计和开发 STEM 学习的新方法和基于证据的理解； (b) 提供多种途径来扩大 STEM 学习体验的获取和参与； (c) 推进非正式环境中 STEM 学习的创新研究和评估； (d) 让所有年龄段的公众在非正式环境中学习 STEM。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

项目成果

Talking with machines: Can conversational technologies serve as children's social partners?

• DOI: 10.1111/cdep.12475
• 发表时间: 2022-12-30
• 期刊: CHILD DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES
• 影响因子: 6.4
• 作者: Xu, Ying

“Elinor’s Talking to Me!”:Integrating Conversational AI into Children’s Narrative Science Programming

“埃莉诺在跟我说话！”：将对话式人工智能融入儿童叙事科学编程

• DOI: 10.1145/3491102.3502050
• 发表时间: 2022
• 期刊: Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• 作者: Xu, Ying;Vigil, Valery;Bustamante, Andres S.;Warschauer, Mark
• 通讯作者: Warschauer, Mark

Contingent interaction with a television character promotes children's science learning and engagement

与电视角色的偶然互动促进儿童的科学学习和参与

• DOI: 10.1016/j.appdev.2022.101439
• 发表时间: 2022
• 期刊: Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology
• 影响因子: 3
• 作者: Xu, Ying;Vigil, Valery;Bustamante, Andres S.;Warschauer, Mark
• 通讯作者: Warschauer, Mark

Fantastic Questions and Where to Find Them: FairytaleQA – An Authentic Dataset for Narrative Comprehension

奇妙的问题以及在哪里可以找到它们：FairytaleQA — 用于叙事理解的真实数据集

• DOI: 10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.34
• 发表时间: 2022
• 期刊: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers
• 作者: Xu, Ying;Wang, Dakuo;Yu, Mo;Ritchie, Daniel;Yao, Bingsheng;Wu, Tongshuang;Zhang, Zheng;Li, Toby;Bradford, Nora;Sun, Branda
• 通讯作者: Sun, Branda

StoryBuddy: A Human-AI Collaborative Chatbot for Parent-Child Interactive Storytelling with Flexible Parental Involvement

• DOI: 10.1145/3491102.3517479
• 发表时间: 2022-02
• 期刊: Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• 作者: Zheng Zhang;Ying Xu;Yanhao Wang;Bingsheng Yao;Daniel E. Ritchie;Tongshuang Sherry Wu;Mo Yu;Dakuo Wang;Toby Jia-Jun Li