Clinical trial NCT02854462: Supporting Children's School Readiness.
Official title: A Randomised Control Trial to Test the Effect of Parents' Inference-eliciting Questions During Shared Book Reading on 4-year-olds' Listening Comprehension
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: COMPLETED
Phase: NA
Conditions: Language Development
Keywords: Language Development
Shared Picture Book reading
Preschoolers
Inference making
Lead sponsor: University of Sheffield
Sponsor class: OTHER
Collaborators: name: University of Leeds
First posted: 2016-08-03
Enrollment: 100
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 50
Maximum age (years): 56
Standard ages: CHILD
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Allocation: RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: PARALLEL
Primary purpose: BASIC_SCIENCE

Brief summary: The aim of this project is to test whether training parents to ask their children 'inference- eliciting' questions during book reading is effective in promoting story comprehension for 4-year-olds from a range of socio-economic backgrounds.

Detailed description: Language comprehension relies on the ability to make local and global inferences (e.g., inferring what a pronoun refers to, or inferring why a protagonist in a story did something based on information distributed through the text). These skills develop in the preschool years and are demonstrated when children make sense of stories that are read to them. While important for later reading ability and academic success, relatively little is known about whether anything can be done to improve inference-making skills in the preschool years. One possibility is that parent-child book reading would help. During book reading, some parents naturally ask their children questions about the story that would require them to make inferences about the text. The current study is designed to test whether doing this promotes children's ability to make inferences. Half the parents in this study will be given books with inference eliciting questions added to them and will be provided with training about how to ask these questions and respond to their children's answers. The other half of the parents will be given a maths exercise book and asked to spend the same amount of time per day working through this.

Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

Children are:

First born Full term (i.e. born no more than 3 weeks prematurely) With birth weight over 2.5 kg Being raised as monolingual English speakers

Exclusion Criteria:

Neither caregivers nor infants have any significant known physical, mental or learning disability.

Primary outcomes:
measure: Change after 4 weeks in children's ability to answer inference questions.
timeFrame: Baseline: when child is 4 years 3 months. Post test: 4 weeks post intervention
Secondary outcomes:
measure: Change in NFER baseline assessment
timeFrame: Baseline: when child is 4 years 3 months - 4 years 6 months. Post test: 4 weeks post intervention
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Sheffield
country: United Kingdom
facility: University of Sheffield
state: South Yorkshire
Study officials:
affiliation: University of Sheffield
name: Danielle E Matthews, PhD
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
affiliation: University of Leeds
name: Catherine Davies, PhD
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
References: