HCC: Small: Collaborative Research: Cloud Primer: Leveraging Common Sense Computing to Learn Parent-Child Interaction Models for Early Childhood Literacy

Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester MA

Investigators

Abstract

Providing young children with opportunities to develop early literacy skills is important to their success in school, their success in learning to read, and their success in life. This project focuses on the creation of a new interactive reading primer technology on tablet computers that will foster early literacy skills and shared parent-child reading through the use of a targeted discussion-topic suggestion system aimed at the adult participant. The Cloud Primer will crowdsource the interactions and discussions of parent-child dyads across a community of readers. It will then leverage this information in combination with a common sense knowledge base to develop computational models of the interactions. These models will then be used to provide context-sensitive discussion topic suggestions to parents during the shared reading activity with young children. The work will be evaluated in week-long at-home studies. Intellectual merit: The project will make fundamental theoretical contributions to models of human-human and human-computer interaction, and their use in fostering engagement and learning. The effort will also produce new insights into how common sense reasoning can be integrated with large-scale data collection to develop interactive technologies that deal gracefully with inconsistencies and noise to provide diverse and semantically meaningful responses in unconstrained, real-world environments. Broader impacts: Research shows that one in three children in the United States enter kindergarten unprepared, and the majority of children who start behind typically stay behind. The Cloud Primer will counteract this trend by leveraging a community of readers to define a set of common discussion topics, actively exposing parents to these topics, and, through a simple touch interface, providing children of pre-reading age a mechanism for engaging adults in discussion. The new context and common sense aware interactive reading primer will be a fundamental advance over current digital reading technologies, which neither effectively achieve educational goals when used alone, nor support joint reading and adult engagement. The project will further contribute to education through undergraduate research, graduate thesis research, graduate course development, and outreach programs to women and under-represented minorities. To promote research in this area, the project will make all parent-child interaction data captured and annotated in the process of this research freely available to the research community, together with the Cloud Primer software. Furthermore, the computational methods developed through the course of this research will have applications in interactive domains beyond early literacy, such as foreign language learning.