Developing an early understanding of contagion in preschool- and kindergarten-aged children

该项目的目标是创建和测试故事书干预的有效性，重点是增加幼儿对疾病和传染病的生物学知识。这项研究集中在传染的主题有几个原因。首先，研究表明，在疾病传播领域缺乏任何明确的指导或培训，往往会形成幼稚和往往不正确的理论，这些理论后来很难补救。事实上，有证据表明，一些关于传染的错误理论甚至一直持续到成年。第二，教导儿童有关疾病传播的知识对发展与健康有关的行为很重要，这对公共卫生有直接影响。鉴于COVID-19大流行造成的经济和社会破坏，现在是时候开发材料，帮助教育工作者和家长向儿童传授疾病传播知识了。该项目将以故事书阅读的形式创建和测试非正式学习干预，为学龄前和10岁儿童提供有关疾病传播因果机制的信息。孩子们将被随机分配听一本关于疾病的故事书，旨在教他们关于疾病传播的因果机制，一本关于疾病的故事书，没有关于传播的因果信息，或者一本与疾病无关的故事书。然后，该研究将测试儿童在故事书阅读前后以及3个月随访时对疾病传播的知识。措施包括行为的影响，故事书通过使用疾病回避任务，以检查儿童的行为对一个潜在的污染玩具。此外，该研究还检查了从故事书阅读到3个月随访期间儿童课堂缺席的记录和有关儿童在家健康行为的信息。这项研究使用这些额外的行为数据来建立一个关于学校本身的流行病学模型，评估这种干预对更广泛的社区健康的潜在影响。该项目由一个跨学科团队设计，将联合收割机从心理学，认知科学和流行病学技术相结合，创造一个非正式的学习经验，可以直接估计的潜在影响。这项研究对帮助幼儿保护自己免受疾病的影响具有潜在的深远影响，开发一种简单而吸引人的干预措施，可以让家长，学校，图书馆和其他教育机构获得。ECR计划强调基础STEM教育研究，产生该领域的基础知识。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力审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The goal of this project is to create and test the effectiveness of a storybook intervention that focuses on increasing young children's biological knowledge of illness and contagion. The study focuses on the topic of contagion for several reasons. First, research has shown that in the absence of any explicit instruction or training in the domain of illness transmission, naive and often incorrect theories are often formed, which are difficult to remedy later. In fact, there is evidence that some incorrect theories about contagion persist even into adulthood. Second, teaching children about illness transmission is important for the development of health-related behaviors, which has direct implications for public health. And given the economic and social disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is timely to develop materials to help educators and parents teach children about illness transmission.This project will create and test an informal learning intervention, in the form of a storybook reading, to provide preschool- and kindergarten-aged children with information about the causal mechanisms of illness transmission. Children will be randomly assigned to hear a storybook about illness that is designed to teach them about the causal mechanisms that drive illness transmission, a storybook about illness with no causal information about transmission, or a storybook unrelated to illness. The study will then test children's knowledge about illness transmission before and after the storybook reading and at a 3-month follow-up. Measures include the behavioral impact of the storybook by using an illness avoidance task to examine children’s behavior toward a potentially contaminated toy. Further, the study examines records of absences from the children's classrooms and information about children's health behaviors at home from the time of the storybook reading to the 3-month follow-up. The study uses these additional behavioral data to build an epidemiological model about the schools themselves that assesses the potential magnitude of this intervention on broader community health. Designed by an interdisciplinary team, the project will combine techniques from psychology, cognitive science, and epidemiology to create an informal learning experience with potential impacts that can be estimated directly. This research has potential far-reaching impacts on helping young children protect themselves from getting sick, developing an easy and engaging intervention that can be made accessible to parents, schools, libraries, and other educational institutions.This project is supported by NSF's EDU Core Research (ECR) program. The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. Investments are made in critical areas that are essential, broad and enduring: STEM learning and STEM learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development.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.