One of the things that I’ve seen more and more of in the last decade is teachers showing a video of a book being read aloud to kids, replacing the regular adult-led, read-aloud activity that was the hallmark of elementary classrooms for decades.
Now as a parent, and someone who studies social interaction in classrooms, this has always felt very unsettling to me – but I wasn’t sure why. So I dug into some recent research on this topic
First of all, let’s talk about reading aloud to kids. It’s something we all do for our little ones – bedtime stories been a hallmark of most childhoods and we are encouraged to do this through infancy and into middle childhood (or even longer if your kids will tolerate it).
Reading aloud at the end of the day is a good way to help your child relax before sleep and a is way to have a shared experience allowing you to connect. But are there other reasons we read aloud to children?
Research is pretty persuasive about this – reading to kids helps them become successful readers themselves. At the most basic level, reading to little ones introduces them to the nature of a book, to turning pages and the concept that text is words and is associated with school readiness – which is associated with better educational outcomes in the long run.
However beyond the academic value, reading aloud to our kids is associated with development of narrative skills – both comprehension of stories and the telling of them later. In addition, stories help kids develop an understanding of different people’s experiences, develop their socioemotional skills and increases vocabulary.
So what happens when we decide that a screen can be substituted for a parent or teacher? A recent study by Meredith Pecukonis and colleagues at Boston University provides us with some important insight. The answer is, basically, no – human interaction is different from screen interaction – and in ways that matter for learning
In the figure here – copied from the Pecukonis paper – we see the results. There is far more right hemisphere activation in the book reading condition than in the screen condition. So while decoding processes are happening in both conditions, the children are putting cognitive resources into social information processing in the human condition, but much less in the screen condition.
Does this matter to our kids? Yes, I think it probably does. The feeling that using a screen to read a story just misses out on the important human connection is probably a big deal. In a world where technology is taking over more and more, we are going to need kids to have better social skills and ability to multi-task content and social issues simultaneously.
Note: image of kids watching a screen generated by ChatGBT.
