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

该项目将研究技术如何更好地支持儿童的早期识字技能。研究表明，当父母在家陪孩子读书时，孩子们可以学到重要的技能，但来自低收入家庭或父母一方有残疾的家庭的孩子进入幼儿园的时间往往远远落后于他们的同龄人。为了让这些孩子更平等地获得识字机会，这项研究将与来自低收入家庭的盲人父母合作，创造新的阅读技术，供儿童使用。这项研究很重要，因为每七个美国人中就有一个人的识字能力低于基本水平，这一事实威胁到了我们的国家安全和经济繁荣。这个项目将研究亲子共同阅读的体验，重点是加强“额外的文本”互动，比如当父亲问他的孩子关于故事书情节的问题时，孩子通过指着页面上的图片来回答。互动技术提供了新的机会，为实现所有儿童的“阅读准备”搭建了这些重要的文本外互动。采用参与式、通用的可用性设计方法，将主要为与视力正常的孩子共同阅读的盲人父母开发解决方案。后续调查将探索这些解决方案将惠及更广泛人群的潜力。项目成果将包括一个包容性的共同阅读现象学模型，以及一个适用于家庭环境的技术原型。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.