Parental Scaffolding of Children's Perception-Action Skills

University Of Iowa, Iowa City IA

Investigators

Abstract

Collisions between motor vehicles and child pedestrians are a leading source of death and disability for children. Parents play a primary role in teaching children how to safely cross a road, yet little is known about the kinds of guidance parents provide to their children while crossing roads together. Even less is known about how parents' level of risk tolerance impacts their approach to teaching children about road crossing safety and how children's self-regulation skills impact the lessons they learn about safe road crossing. This interdisciplinary project leverages an immersive virtual environment technology and wearable pedestrian recording technology to study how parents and their 6- to 8-year-old children individually and jointly cross virtual and real roads. Findings from this project can advance understanding of the role of guided learning in the acquisition of perception-action skills and help identify successful strategies for teaching children how to cross roads safely. The scientific objective of this project is to understand the development of perception-action and decision-making skills in the context of children performing challenging tasks (such as crossing roads) jointly with more experienced individuals (such as parents). In Phase I of the project, parents and children individually and jointly cross virtual roads involving two common road-crossing problems: (1) deciding whether an approaching vehicle intends to yield, and (2) deciding when to cross a stream of continuous traffic. Additionally, parents complete questionnaires about their risk tolerance and their child's self-regulation skills. In Phase II of the project, parents and children cross roads in their own neighborhood while wearing head-mounted cameras to record their interactions during naturalistic road crossing. The data gathered are used to test a model that links the parent's risk tolerance level to the child's independent road crossing skills via experiences with dyad riskiness, parental guidance during joint parent-child road crossing, and child's self-regulation skills. This project advances understanding of other-guided learning as a mechanism of skill learning in the perception-action domain. 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.