Dr. Read gave a talk at this year’s Psychonomics conference in New York City, highlighting our lab’s recent findings from a two year project on how well children can remember new names for animals after having correctly or incorrectly predicted them. The talk was summarized for us in the Saturday highlights from the conference (below) and a more detailed paper will be coming out next year describing the work.
Congrats to the Read Lab’s class of 2024! While our seniors are moving on to their next chapters,
the projects in the lab that they’ve been leading are just beginning to blossom.
Here are Irene, Ella, Elsa and Sophie presenting their findings from our “Book Types & Reader Goals” study at the Alumni Science Conference
And Sarah and Natalia presenting their first round of findings from our “Reading Bilingual Books with Bilingual Learners” study at the Alumni Science Conference
Dr. Read and Read Lab alumni Sara Rabinowitz ’21 and Hayley Harrison ’23 recently published an exploratory review covering 50 years of study and observation in the developmental psychology and early education literature of how parents use of extra-textual talk during shared book reading (aka the side-conversation and commentary that parents use while reading aloud), how that extra-textual talk has been categorized and leveled, and what factors contribute to parents differing styles of extra-textual talk. The paper, available online now in the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy will serve as a foundation for dozens of future research questions in the Read Lab around how reading aloud with young children can support early language development!
During the pandemic lots of families with young children had a crash course in using, even depending on, video-chat technologies to stay connected with relatives and friends, and even preschool children had experiences with trying to learn from synchronous video-chat with educators and caregivers. In a new study from the Read Lab started in 2021 and published this month, we tested just how well children could learn new vocabulary words (cute monster names) from a story read-aloud over zoom. It turns out, the word learning was pretty challenging for 3- to 5-year-olds who volunteered for our study, but the fun they had was easy.
Check out the full open-access paper here.
Student co-authors presenting the findings at the Sigma Xi Honors Society research celebration. Brianna Mireku & Katrina Ying in 2022 (top), and Hayley Harrison in 2023
At the start of this academic year, the Read Lab’s fearless leader was honored by the College of Arts and Sciences at SCU with the Bernard Hubbard S. J. award “In recognition of having established a well-deserved reputation for excellence in educating students by including them in professional research projects or creative activity, thereby transcending traditional teaching models to reach the heart of the research and creative process.” It’s an award that speaks not only to Dr. Read’s mentorship, but also especially to the great work of the talented undergraduate students who power our lab year after year! Read more about the award, and what makes our lab so special.
It’s been a slow bumpy road back from the all-virtual all-remote lab meetings and research studies of late 2020 and 2021, but this summer we’ve been watering our research seeds so that in the new academic year we’ll see some new work growing
First, we’ve been reading (of course!) and writing, and have a big new paper ready to share summarizing 50 years (!) of developmental psychologists’ and early education researchers’ approaches to gathering and coding and measuring all the fun, messy, and incredibly rich extra-textual conversation that parents and children have alongside the words in the books as they read aloud. There’s so many ways to organize all that conversation, and so many interesting factors that impact it – read all about it here in our open access preprint!
In 2017, Read Lab alumna Christy Pavlov (nee McCullom) wanted to know more about the benefits of reading aloud with young children, but not the benefits to the children, themselves (we know there’s LOTS of those!) but more the benefits to the adult reader.
Does reading a book with a young child make an adult feel happy? Does it give them a sense of connection? Is there something special about reading, above and beyond just being together with a child that can have some positive emotional benefit for the reader?
Well, it turns out, yes.
After three years and the teamwork of five other research students in the Read Lab, including recent graduate Sara Rabinowitz who worked through the pandemic on analyzing data and writing about this work, a new paper is out that describes and documents the real mood boosts that volunteer readers experience when they read aloud with preschool-aged children.
The best part, is this new study is open-access, so you can read about all the details here.
In fact, maybe you should read this paper aloud, with a child, and see how you feel after 🙂
Maybe you, like us, have been wondering whether during the early days of COVID when families with young children were all staying home together and reorganizing their daily lives, if that meant more reading time, or less reading time, or just totally different kinds of reading time?
Well, The Read Lab (Dr. Read, with student co-authors Grace Gaffney (’21), Amina Imran (’21) and visiting UCLA student Ashley Chen) just published a new study of the impacts of COVID-19 related “stay-at-home” orders and early childhood education and care (ECEC) closures in the Spring and Summer of 2020 on young children and their families’ shared book reading at home.
The research found that, even while COVID massively disrupted young children’s care routines, families with the resources available still prioritized their children’s reading time, and found creative, screen mediated, ways to adapt – one small, but important sign of resilience for families in an otherwise tumultuous and challenging year.Â
Here’s the link to the full paper published in the Early Childhood Education Journal, or a preprint archived here.Â
The Read Lab is trying something new. We’re inviting dual-language learners who are working on their Spanish and English and their grown-ups to read bilingual books with us over zoom.
We’ve missed getting to be together in person with kids and families, but we’re still working hard to understand how different types of storybooks can help support language learning for many types of learners. So, we (like everyone!) are trying something virtual.
If you know a 3-6 year old Spanish/English learner who likes animal books and is willing to try some reading over zoom, let us know! Here is a link to an interest form – if you fill it out, we’ll get back to you with more information about this study and details about how to participate.
This month, the Read Lab is celebrating (virtually) the publication of our 10th peer-reviewed research study. All the research we do in the lab is focused on preschoolers and how they play and learn language skills from playful everyday experiences like shared reading.
We’re so proud that this work is out there in the big wide world for developmental scientists and parents and teachers (and people who are all three!) to learn from. Here’s our list, and here’s to another ten great projects in the future!
The Seuss boost: Rhyme helps children retain words from shared storybook reading (2014) by Kirsten Read, Megan Macauley & Erin Furay
Clues cue the smooze: rhyme, pausing, and prediction help children learn new words from storybooks (2014) by Kirsten Read
The third voice: Do enhanced e-books enhance the benefits of shared story reading with preschoolers? (2016) by Kathleen Ciffone, Andrew Weaver & Kirsten Read
Pie, fry, why: Language play in 3-to 5-year-old children (2017) by Kirsten Read, Sarah James & Andrew Weaver
The cat has a…: Children’s use of rhyme to guide sentence completion (2018) by Kirsten Read and Madeline Regan
Rhyme and word placement in storybooks support high-level verb mapping in 3-to 5-year-olds (2018) by Kirsten Read & Jacqueline Quirke
Using strategic pauses during shared reading with preschoolers: Time for prediction is better than time for reflection when learning new words (2019) by Kirsten Read, Erin Furay & Dana Zylstra
E-books for children with autism: Best read alone or with a therapist? (2020) by Erin Soares, Therese Miller, Kathleen Ciffone & Kirsten Read
Can reading personalized storybooks to children increase their prosocial behavior? (2020) by Ellen Kruse, Isabelle Faller & Kirsten Read
¿Read conmigo?: The effect of code-switching storybooks on dual-language learners’ retention of new vocabulary (2020) by Kirsten Read, Paloma Contreras, Bianca Rodriguez & Jessica Jara