Transcript One Book at a Time: Libraries in Village Communities

Studying the Effectiveness of a
Storytelling/Story-Acting
Activity on Preschool Children’s School Readiness
Skills in a Rural Ugandan Community Library
DR. GEOFF GOODMAN, Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program
VALEDA DENT, University Libraries
ERIC YELLIN, Clinical Psychology Doctoral Student
LIU POST CAMPUS
MARCH 1, 2012
A (short documentary) is worth a thousand
words…
History of the Rural Library Project and Relevant
Research

Uganda, East Africa – Three impact studies (2004, 2005, 2006) conducted at Kitengesa
Community Library (Dent; Dent & Yannotta). Longitudinal study of intergenerational
impact (Goodman & Dent, 2009, 2011).

Burkina Faso, West Africa – Impact study at five rural libraries (Bereba, Dohoun, Sara,
Karaba, and Koumbia) in 2006 & 2007. Surveys at Bereba Secondary School (Dent).

Ghana, West Africa – Impact study at Sherigu and Sumbrungu in 2004 & 2005 (Dent,
Entrup).
The Research Setting
One of the legacies of colonialism on the African continent is the widespread illiteracy and
entrenched poverty that interfere with its people’s full participation in the global economy.
As of 1991, 54% of all Africans were illiterate. In some African countries, the illiteracy
rate was over 90% (Kedem, 1991). Africa is also the poorest region in the world and the
only major developing region with negative growth in income per capita during 1980 to
2000 (Sachs et al., 2004). In sub-Saharan Africa, the average daily wage is 74¢. The
average life expectancy is 46 years, while the average child mortality rate (deaths before
the age of 5 per 1,000 live births) is 172.5 (Sachs et al., 2004). Improvement in the
literacy rate could provide the necessary conditions for an economic renaissance in Africa
through mass dissemination of information that people could then use to produce goods
and services in demand in other parts of Africa and overseas (Dent, 2007). The role of
literacy in the functioning of the democratic process has also been noted (Kranich, 2001;
Stilwell, 1989, 1991).
Current Research Study Overview
The Storytelling/Story-Acting Activity (STSA) is an activity developed by educator Vivian
Paley (e.g., 1990) in which children, through their engaged participation, are enabled and
encouraged to generate an ongoing practice of peer-oriented narrative collaboration. STSA
combines narrative and play that can be deeply engaging to children and, in the process,
helps them to develop strong language skills. As its name implies, the activity includes a
storytelling and a story-acting phase. At the beginning of the activity, any child who wishes
can dictate a story to the librarian, who writes down the story as the child tells it with minimal
intervention. Later during the activity, each story is read aloud to the entire group by the
librarian, while the child/author and other children, whom he or she chooses, act out the
story (Nicolopoulou & Cole, 2010).
STSA Goals
1. To foster a culture of cooperation, inclusion, and collaborative learning in the library.
2. To promote children’s acquisition of key, mutually reinforcing elements of school readiness
(i.e., narrative comprehension, social competence, emergent literacy).
a) STSA increases children’s vocabulary, language complexity, and story comprehension and
production—skills found to promote literacy acquisition best.
b) In creating and acting in their own and others’ stories, children gain knowledge of the
power of stories.
c) Telling stories for and with their peers and acting them out together for an audience helps
children develop self-regulation and the capacity to make and maintain friends.
d) STSA promotes children’s abilities to understand others’ perspectives, including their
internal worlds, thoughts, and emotions, and their coordination:
1) expressing increasingly complex and coherent stories
2) cooperating with other children during the dramatization of stories
3) enacting a fictional character and taking various characters’ points of view
(Nicolopoulou & Childs, 2002-2003)
Play in Relation to STSA
Children desire to realize their wishes through fantasy or imagination.
Two interconnected components of social pretend play (Vygotsky, 1978):
1) An imaginary situation (a possible world)
2) Rules that define and create the imaginary situation.
In play, children self-consciously impose rules on themselves rather than receiving them
from others. Play pushes the child beyond the perceptually bound world to the creation—in
imagination—of a symbolic world dominated by meanings, with its own internal logic, in
which action arises from ideas (internal mental world) rather than things (Nicolopoulou,
1997).
In STSA, children experience stories contextualized by the actions of themselves and
others. Because a play scenario is acted out, children can see more clearly how things fit—
or don’t fit—together in the scenario that they tried to create only with words.
Storytelling/Story-Acting Protocol
Writing Benita’s Story
Storytelling/Story-Acting Protocol
Acting Benita’s Story
Research Hypotheses
1. Children who participate in the Kitengesa Community Library Storytelling/StoryActing (STSA) activity once per week will have higher scores in three domains of
school readiness (emergent literacy, narrative comprehension, and social
competence) than children who live in Kitengesa and Ggulema and do not
participate in this activity.
2. Primary caregiver reading/literacy habits, cumulative social/contextual risk, and
primary caregiver sensitivity relating to the child will moderate the effect of group
placement (Kitengesa reading group participation, Kitengesa nonparticipation,
Ggulema nonparticipation) on school readiness outcomes.
Measures
SES Indicators
1. Africa Centre Demographic Information System (ACDIS), an 11-item survey that
assesses SES (Tanser et al., 2008; 10 minutes)
Total Possessions:
Cellphone, Television, Video Recorder or DVD, Radio/Stereo, Cattle, Other
Livestock, Telephone, Electricity Supply, Car, Motor Scooter, Bicycle, Tractor,
Cement Floors
2. Supplemental Questionnaire, a 25-item survey that supplements information from the
ACDIS and provides additional information about SES and social support (Schaefer, Coyne,
& Lazarus, 1981; 10 minutes)
Social Support:
Whom can you confide in?
Whom could you turn to in an emergency?
Whom could you turn to after surgery?
Caregivers’ Physical Health/Quality of Life/Depression
1. Dartmouth COOP Charts, a 9-item survey that assesses the quality of the person’s
physical health and its effects on their quality of life on nine key health-related dimensions
during the past two weeks:
Feelings, Daily Activities, Pain, Physical Fitness, Change in Health, Social
Activities, Social Support (during past four weeks), Overall Health, Quality of Life
(during past four weeks)
This instrument has been used previously in Uganda (Nelson et al., 1987;
Nuwagaba-Biribonwoha, Mayon-White, Okong, Carpenter, & Jenkinson, 2006; 10
minutes)
2. SF-36 Health Survey—Item 9 (Depression), a 9-item measure of depression during the
past four weeks (Ware, Snow, Kosinski, & Gandek, 1993; 5 minutes)
Full of Life, Nervous Person, Down in Dumps, Calm and Peaceful, A Lot of
Energy, Downhearted and Low, Worn Out, Happy Person, Tired
Cumulative Social-Contextual Risk
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Children Under Age 6
Caregiver’s Age When First Child Born
Daily Household Income
Total Possessions
Level of Education
In or Out of Relationship
Quality of Significant Relationship
Employment Status
Level of Social Support
Physical Health/Quality of Life
Depression
Children’s Narrative Comprehension
1. Oral Retelling Task, which consists of telling a story to a puppet, then asking the child to
retell the same story to the puppet. Afterward, the child is asked seven questions that
assess the child’s story comprehension (Nicolopoulou et al., 2010; 2 minutes)
2. Picture Sequence Task, which consists of two sets of four pictures each. For each set of
four pictures, the child is asked to tell a story. After the first set, the child is asked seven
questions that assess the child’s story comprehension. After the second set, the child is
asked three questions that assess the child’s story comprehension (Nicolopoulou et al.,
2010; 5 minutes)
3. Single Picture Task, which consists of showing a picture of two children, a dragon, and a
nest of eggs, then telling a story about the picture. Afterward, the child is asked seven
questions that assess the child’s story comprehension (Nicolopoulou et al., 2010; 2 minutes)
4. Spontaneous Story Task, in which the child is told: “I need your help. I am putting
together a book of children’s stories. Could you tell me a story for my book?” (Nicolopoulou
et al., 2010; 2 minutes)
Children’s Social Competence
1. 5 Theory of Mind Tasks that assess the child’s awareness of how mental states such as memories, beliefs,
desires, and intentions govern the behavior of self and others (Peterson, Wellman, & Liu, 2005; 10 minutes)
2. Recognition of Emotion Concepts Task, which consists of a series of 30 pictures in which the child is shown
four cartoon drawings (including the target emotion and three distractors) and asked to identify the picture that
corresponds to the word provided (Domitrovich, Cortes, & Greenberg, 2007; 5 minutes)
3. Play Interview, a 9-item measure of the child’s pretend play abilities, which are believed to be precursors to
successful social pretend play (Nicolopoulou, Brockmeyer, de Sá, Ilgaz, & Cortina, 2011; Taylor, 1999; 5 minutes)
4. Day/Night Task, a 16-trial measure of inhibitory control, which is believed to be an important component of
self-regulation and thus social competence (Domitrovich et al., 2007; 3 minutes)
5. Tapping Test, a 16-trial measure of inhibitory control, which is believed to be an important component of selfregulation and thus social competence (Domitrovich et al., 2007; 3 minutes)
6. The Attachment Story-Completion Task is a semi-structured interview used to assess the child’s internal
working model or mental representation of the attachment relationship to the primary caregiver. The ASCT
consists of five story stems designed “to access the internal working models of attachment...through a storycompletion task, acted out with small family figures” (Bretherton, Ridgeway, & Cassidy, 1990, p. 284; 20 minutes)
Video Clips
Children’s Emergent Literacy
1. Kilifi Picture Vocabulary Test, a 24-picture measure of receptive vocabulary that has
been translated into Luganda, the native language of these children, by Maggie Nampijja, a
Ugandan child development researcher (Holding et al., 2004; Nampijja et al., 2010; 4
minutes)
2. Bracken Basic Concept Scale-III—School Readiness Composite (SRC), an 85-item
interview that assesses school readiness skills in five domains (Bracken, 2006; 10 minutes)
Colors
Letters
Numbers/counting
Sizes/comparisons
Shapes
Descriptive Statistics
Descriptive Statistics by Group
Zero-Order Correlations Among Variables of Caregiver and
Child Variables
Prediction of School Readiness Skills
Prediction of School Readiness Skills Using Hierarchical
Multiple-Regression Analysis
Prediction of School Readiness Skills Using Hierarchical
Multiple-Regression Analysis, Controlling for Child Age and
Receptive Vocabulary
Summary of Findings at Time 1
1. Assessment of narrative comprehension failed.
a) The assessment instruments could be culturally biased.
b) Telling a story based on pictorial stimuli is an unfamiliar process to the children because
they are unaware that a pictorial symbol carries a meaning that can be expressed verbally in
the construction of a story.
c) Children’s memories are not processing information in a linear manner required of
understanding a text.
d) These children seem to perform better on highly structured tasks that contextualize
meanings with actions (e.g., Attachment Story-Completion Task).
2. Cumulative social-contextual risk did not predict school readiness skills. Perhaps an
attenuated range limited potential significant findings.
Summary of Findings at Time 1 (continued)
3. Nonverbally mediated self-regulation as assessed by the Tapping Test predicted school
readiness skills after controlling for receptive vocabulary skills.
a) Perhaps only nonverbally mediated tasks are valid for this sample.
b) Perhaps motoric self-regulation is instrumental in attending to and concentrating on
school-based learning tasks assessed by the Bracken School Readiness Assessment.
4. Not controlling for child’s age and receptive vocabulary, children’s theory of mind mediated the
relation between caregiver depression and school readiness skills. Higher depression levels were
positively correlated with more school readiness skills.
a) Caregivers who are more aware of their depression (less in denial) are also more aware of
the mental states of their children, which in turn facilitates their children’s acquisition of theory
of mind.
b) Some clinical literature has criticized self-report measures of clinical symptoms because of
the self-report biases associated with social and intrapersonal desirability (Shedler, Mayman,
& Manis, 1993, 1994).
Next Steps
Conduct the same evaluation on all three groups of
caregivers and children to determine the
effectiveness of the STSA activity on school
readiness skills.
Sociocultural Implications
 Literacy development (library programs) for the youngest
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readers.
Role of primary caregivers important, how can the library
support them?
Reading culture development key for economic
development.
Continue to measure the library’s impact on students as
they grow older.
Use findings to support creation of new village libraries, as
well as programmatic and collection development for these
libraries.
The Research Team
Project Acknowledgments
Principal Investigators
Geoff Goodman
Valeda Dent
Caregiver Interviewers
Valeda Dent
Chantal Watler
Caregiver Translators
Ssewanyana Baker
Nakayiba Sophia
Child Interviewers
Geoff Goodman
Eric Yellin
Child Translators
Julius Ssentume
Nanyonjo Haliima
Ugandan Project Coordinator
Julius Ssentume
American Project Coordinator
Tina Lo
Documentarian
Eric Yellin
Subject Recruitment
Julius Ssentume
Ssewanyana Baker
Materials Design
Tina Lo
Dustin Kahoud
Data Entry
Tina Lo
Geoff Goodman
Caregiver and Child Transcription
Jennifer Andersen
Brianna Blake
Deborah Chu
Melissa DeFalco
Stephanie Fernandez
Cassia Mosdell (accepted for fall, 2012)
Jane Piesman
Danielle Sauro
David Shin
Eric Yellin
Kitengesa Community Library Founder
Kate Parry
Extramural Grant Funding
International Psychoanalytical Association
International Reading Association (under review)
Student Support
Dr. Paul Forestell, Provost, LIU Post
Visit Kitengesa Community Library www.kitengesalibrary.org