Children's storytelling technologies: Differences in elaboration and recall

Abstract

This paper is based on a doctoral dissertation submitted by Angela Boltman in partial fulfillment of a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland at College Park. This study could not have been accomplished without the generous funding of the European Union's Experimental Schools Environments initiative (project 29310) and the assistance of members of "KidStory", a three-year research team that focused on creating storytelling technologies for young children. We would particularly like to acknowledge Benjamin Bederson and Juan Pablo Hourcade, our colleagues at the University of Maryland and chief architects of the KidPad technology. We would like to thank Allison Farber, who recreated the book images in KidPad for this study. Our colleagues Carina Fast and Marita Kjellin at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and Danae Stanton, Sue Cobb, and Claire O'Malley at the University of Nottingham supported the study in many ways. In addition, we would like to thank Steve Benford from the University of Nottingham and Yngve Sundblad from the Royal Institute of Technology for their project leadership and continual support of our research. We would also like to acknowledge the contributions of Melanie Killen at the University of Maryland as an ever-patient reviewer of this paper. Finally, we would like to thank the children in England and Sweden who participated in the study and who taught us a great deal about storytelling. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Allison Druin at the University of Maryland, 3180 A.V. Williams Building, College Park, Maryland 20782 or electronically at allisond@umiacs.umd.edu. Abstract This study examined the elaboration and recall of children's stories through an analysis of the content and structure of children's retelling of a wordless picture book. The book was presented to 72 children (ages 6-7) in England and Sweden. Using a between subjects design, each child was presented with either a paper version of the picture book, a computer presentation with traditional hyperlinks, or a computer presentation with panning and zooming. The technology that was used was KidPad, a children's spatial storytelling application (Druin et al., 1997). Results revealed that the computer presentation with panning and zooming offered benefits in elaboration and recall by means of more complex story structure and a greater understanding of initiating events and goals. (UMIACS-TR-2001-87) (HCIL-TR-2001-25)