Most current CAs cater to monolingual children and are not designed to promote parental engagement in the learning process. To fill this gap, in partnership with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, we have iteratively developed and evaluated a Spanish-English bilingual CA embodied in Rosita from Sesame Street and integrated into culturally relevant children’s ebooks. The CA is capable of code-switching, comprehending, and responding to multilingual children's mixed language use.
Our pilot lab study, winner of the Best Paper Award at IDC ‘23, demonstrated that the bilingual CA effectively promoted children’s verbal engagement and language development while also encouraging meaningful parent-child dialogue related to the story. Feedback from parents highlighted the cultural relevance of the content, the importance of bilingual support, and the potential for enhancing family bonding through shared experiences and discussions initiated by the conversational agent. A follow-up user study conducted among 15 families (currently under review), extended these findings.
Key Findings:
|
Science Learning
This project is designed to foster science learning and engagement among Latine children ages 3-7 through the development, distribution, and evaluation of a series of 24 dialogic Spanish-English bilingual e-books centered around culturally-engaging narrative science stories. The e-books will incorporate conversational agents allowing children to speak Spanish or English with the characters, as well as family discussion prompts to encourage parents and children to participate in dialogic reading. The books will be co-designed and field tested with parents from community-based family early learning organizations in Latine communities of Southern California and Michigan so as to make them relevant to the broad range of Latine communities in the United States. The project will build on our previous NSF grants in which we have (a) developed dialogic media for young children incorporating conversational agents and demonstrated their value in improving science learning and engagement (1906321; 2115382) and (b) successfully carried out educational co-design activities with members of the California early learning organization involved in this project (2005776). We will partner with parents from the Santa Ana, California-based Santa Ana Early Learning Initiative and the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based En Nuestra Lengua to co-design the 24 bilingual e-books, including six each on the topics of physical science; life science; earth and space science; and engineering, technology, and applications of science. The e-books will be based on Latine children’s story-based adventures and align with the Next Generation Science Standards for young children. The e-books will then be distributed for free to Latine families across the country with data collected as to their reach and use. |
Bilingual E-Book Study Demo
|
|
Teacher-AI Collaboration for Interactive Reading Resources
The goal of this project is to leverage automatic question-answer generation to develop an integrated system allowing teachers to collaborate with artificial intelligence (AI) to create and customize interactive reading resources for kindergarten through second grade students. The teacher-AI co-created interactive reading resources feature an adaptive chatbot as an intelligent reading partner that asks students questions, listens to and interprets the student responses, and provides tailored feedback to students during reading. |
