Clinical Trials Directory

Trials / Completed

CompletedNCT02854462

Supporting Children's School Readiness.

A Randomised Control Trial to Test the Effect of Parents' Inference-eliciting Questions During Shared Book Reading on 4-year-olds' Listening Comprehension

Status
Completed
Phase
N/A
Study type
Interventional
Enrollment
100 (actual)
Sponsor
University of Sheffield · Academic / Other
Sex
All
Age
50 Months – 56 Months
Healthy volunteers
Accepted

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.

Conditions

Interventions

TypeNameDescription
BEHAVIORALLanguage comprehension intervention
BEHAVIORALCounting intervention

Timeline

Start date
2016-08-10
Primary completion
2018-03-20
Completion
2018-03-22
First posted
2016-08-03
Last updated
2018-05-04

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United Kingdom

Source: ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT02854462. Inclusion in this directory is not an endorsement.