The Influence Of Media Presentation And Interaction On Children’s Comprehension Of Tales And Theory Of Mind

The ability of theory of mind (TOM) is a vital area in children’s cognitive development. This ability can be improved through the method of training. Among various ways of training, children’s comprehension ability of tales makes great importance in developing this ability. Nowadays, the multimedia technology has become widely used in nursery education. Meanwhile, adults’ interaction with children is always the significant factor in childhood education. In our research, we explored that the different media presentation and whether adults interact with children in using these media can have an effect on children’s understanding the characters’ mental states as well as the score of theory of mind when we train the children.In our research, we first individually provide the pretest of theory of mind (pre-TOM-test) to each child we chose and filter out the children who can pass this test. Then a part of the remaining children serve as the control group, another part of these children participates the training session in the training group. The materials for training session are children’s educational tales which are full of characters’mental states. We train children for four weeks and we use these tales one at a time in each week. The training children are randomly assigned to four training conditions, namely, picture books reading without interaction, picture books reading with interaction, cartoons watching without interaction, cartoon watching with interaction. During the training session, we recorded the score of tales comprehension for each story and the total score of the four tales. Lastly after the training session, we provide the posttest of theory of mind (post-TOM-test) to each child in the two groups. All of the experiments need six weeks.The results firstly show that there is no significant difference between the score of pre-TOM-test and the post-TOM-test in the control group. But children in the training group, their scores of post-TOM-test are significant higher than their scores of pre-TOM-test. As to the total score of the comprehension of tales, we find that present style has a significant main effect, children who watch cartoons get higher score than children who read picture books; Interaction also has a significant main effect, children who interact with adults get more scores than children who read (or watch) books (or cartoons) without interaction. There is a significant interaction effect between present style and interaction, specifically, children who watch cartoons get higher scores than children who read picture books when there is no interaction with adults. But the various training methods have not presented significant difference in children’s scores of post-TOM-test.Finally, we summarize the shortcomings about this research from the ecological validity and the depth of the study. The direction of the research has also been discussed in our paper.