Developing and evaluating pedagogical digital manipulatives for preschool: the case of TOK - touch, organize, create
Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This work aims at contributing to a deeper understanding of the educational value provided by the use of digital manipulatives in preschool. Outgoing from the need expressed by educational professionals and researchers for learning materials that meet children’s physical and cognitive needs, and the lack of longitudinal studies involving digital technology in the preschool context, this work describes the design and development of TOK, a digital manipulative for tangible narrative creation. TOK, which stands for Touch, Organize and Create is a collaborative digital environment, which offers young children a playful and rich environment, for embodied collaborative language exploration, experimentation and tangible narrative creation. TOK is composed by an electronic platform, and a set of 23 picture-blocks, which represent scenarios, characters and objects from familiar stories. Following a Design Based Research methodology, the design - and later the evaluation - of TOK were carried in a Portuguese preschool for a period of four years, involving eight groups of 25 pre-schoolers - ages five - and six preschool teachers. Children and teachers participated from the very beginning in the design process, which followed an iterative, cyclical process of designing, testing, and redesigning, always incorporating the feedback and the suggestions provided by the children and the teachers in the development of new prototypes. The motivation to address storytelling within a collaborative environment emerged out of the understanding that language development is essentially social and interactive. In fact, the development of the language is among the major challenges that children face during the preschool years. Moreover, during the preschool years children experience the ‘best’ learning period to formally learn the language. Following TOK’s implementation three interventions at preschool were carried for a period of around one year. The first was accomplished with 24 pairs of children from two preschool classes, who interacted with TOK during free-play time. This intervention sought to investigate how children used the system and the kind of activities in which they involved. The results showed that children engaged mostly in literacy related activities, creating stories and playing language games. Further, TOK revealed to encourage peer collaboration motivating children to involve in collaborative language activities. The second intervention was carried with a group of 20 children in collaboration with their preschool teacher, and included also a comparison group from a parallel class. The intervention sought to investigate the effect of the use of TOK in the development of language abilities that are relevant for formal literacy learning, namely lexical knowledge and phonological awareness. The construction of multiple fictional worlds generated through children’s embodied interaction with the manipulative, motivated children's continuous verbalizations, contextualizing the learning of an extensive collection of vocabulary and the playing of language games. The results of a pre and a post-test applied to the children showed significant improvements in terms of the targeted language dimensions, sustaining a discussion on the potential of the use of digital manipulatives as powerful scaffolds for fundamental language development in the preschool years. Finally, the last intervention presents an analysis of the narratives created by 27 groups of pre-schoolers, while using TOK for a period of six months. We observed that children’s narrative construction occurred in two levels, as children shared the stage, (controlling the characters, defining the location, the props, and the nature elements) and simultaneously performed on this stage. The sharing of the input devices (blocks) gave children equal control of the performance and orchestration of their stories, while promoting and supporting peer collaboration. Indeed, TOK enabled the performance of embodied stage-narratives, promoting children’s imagination and creative thinking, as well as fostering early literacy skills and metalinguistic awareness. Moreover, we confirmed that welldesigned tangible interfaces do support the development of curricular activities, having the potential to be integrated in the official preschool curriculum. Further, our research showed us the importance of a close collaboration between ICT developers, interaction designers, language researchers and preschool teachers that mediate the development and integration of ICT in the school context.
Author: Cristina Sylla
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W905091215