060: What do children learn from reading books?
25th March 2018 • Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive • Jen Lumanlan
00:00:00
00:53:57
Shownotes
We’ve done a couple of episodes on reading by now; episode 3 (which seems so long ago!) asked whether you might have missed the boat on teaching your toddler to read. Of course, we know that you’ve only missed the boat on that if you think that sitting your child in front of a video so they can recite the words they see without really understanding them counts as “reading.”
Much more recently in episode 48 we talked with Dr. Laura Froyen about the benefits of shared reading with your child and how to do that according to best practices from the research literature.
Those of you who subscribe to my newsletter will recall that I’ve been working on an episode on storytelling for months now. Part of the reason it’s taking so long is that books on storytelling technique say to use original stories wherever possible because the language in them is so much richer, but if you’ve ever read something like an original fairytale you know they can be pretty gory, and even the most harmless ones actually contain some pretty adult themes if you read between the lines.
So I wanted to know: what do children really learn from stories? How do they figure out that we want them to learn morals from stories but not that animal characters walk on two legs and wear clothes? How do they generalize that knowledge to the real world? And are there specific types of books that promote learning?
Join me in a conversation with Dr. Deena Weisberg of The University of Pennsylvania as she helps us to help our children learn through reading!
Other shows mentioned in this episode
003: Did you miss the boat on teaching your child how to read?
010: Becoming Brilliant
048: The benefits of shared reading
References
Cheung, C.S., Monroy, J.A., & Delany, D.E. (2017). Learning-related values in young children’s storybooks: An investigation in the United States, China, and Mexico. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 48(4), 532-541.
Ganea, P.A., Ma, L., & DeLoache, J.S. (2011). Young children’s learning and transfer of biological information from picture books to real animals. Child Development 82(5), 1421-1433.
Heath, S.B. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society 11(1), 49-76.
Hopkins, E.J., & Weisberg, D.S. (2017). The youngest readers’ dilemma: A review of children’s learning from fictional sources. Developmental Review 43, 48-70.
Ostrov, J.M., Gentile, D.A., & Mullins, A.D. (2013). Evaluating the effect of educational media exposure on aggression in early childhood. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 34, 38-44.
Read, K., Macauley, M., & Furay, E. (2014). The Seuss boost: Rhyme helps children retain words from shared storybook reading. First Language 34(4), 354-371.
Ganea, P.A., Ma, L., & DeLoache, J.S. (2011). Young children’s learning and transfer of biological information from picture books to real animals. Child Development 82(5), 1421-1433.
Heath, S.B. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society 11(1), 49-76.
Hopkins, E.J., & Weisberg, D.S. (2017). The youngest readers’ dilemma: A review of children’s learning from fictional sources. Developmental Review 43, 48-70.
Ostrov, J.M., Gentile, D.A., & Mullins, A.D. (2013). Evaluating the effect of educational media exposure on aggression in early childhood. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 34, 38-44.
Read, K., Macauley, M., & Furay, E. (2014). The Seuss boost: Rhyme helps children retain words from shared storybook reading. First Language 34(4), 354-371.
Read Full Transcript
Transcript Jen: [00:38] Hi, this is Jen. Before we start on today’s episode, I just wanted to take a minute to let you know that as part of my research for this episode on what children learn through reading fictional books, I ended up looking at a lot of different kinds of books for children aged roughly between toddlerhood and elementary school, and I compiled them into a list of more than 100 books that you can use to support your children’s learning on a host of subjects related to math, science, empathy, being persistent in the face of failure, multicultural issues, and many other topics as well. If you already subscribed to the show and my website, then you actually already got the list with your newsletter from last week. Unfortunately, subscribing through itunes or other platforms doesn’t count because I don’t get any information from them on how to reach you, so if you don’t already subscribe or if you’re subscribed through another platform, then head on over to YourParentingMojo.com forward slash reading books and sign up on that page and then the report will be emailed right to you. Thanks again for listening and enjoy the interview with Dr Deena Weisberg. Jen: [01:38] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We’ve done a couple episodes on reading by now. Episode three, which seems so long ago, was one where we asked whether you might have missed the boat on teaching your toddler to read. Of course, we know you’ve only missed the boat on that if you think that sitting your child in front of a video so they can recite the words they see without really understanding them counts as reading much more recently in episode 48, we talked with Dr Laura Frye and about the benefits of shared reading with your child and how to do that according to best practices from the research literature I’ve mentioned to those of you who subscribe to my newsletter that I had been working on an episode related to storytelling for a while as in telling stories without books and also making up stories, but I realized I needed a bridge from where we’ve been to where we want to go. Jen: [02:23] I wanted to know more about what children learn from the stories we read to them, and boy, do we have someone who can help us with that today. We’re here with Dr. Deena Weisberg, a senior fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr Weisberg earned her PhD in Psychology from Yale University and in her postdoc work at Rutgers University and also at Temple with Dr Roberta Golinkoff, with whom we spoke in episode 10 on her book becoming brilliant when I started researching what children learn from reading, I found an absolutely epic paper that Dr Weisberg co-authored with five pages of references in tiny text that describes and how children learn from reading fiction, so I knew we’d found the right person to speak with us. She’s also the parent of a five year old and an 18 month old, and has gamely agreed to talk with us today even though her nanny called in sick, so she’s in the thick of this parenting thing with us as well. Welcome Dr Weisberg. Dr. Weisberg: [03:15] Thank you so much, Jen. It’s really a pleasure to be here and talk with you this afternoon. Jen: [03:19] So it wasn’t until I started reading your paper that I realized what a really weird and strange thing it is that we ask of children. We read fiction to them and particularly fiction with some kind of message that we want them to internalize. And in your paper, you give the example of, I hope I’m saying this correctly, the Berenstain Bears visit to the dentist, which we assume is designed to help young children understand and get comfortable with what happens when they go to the dentist, but somehow we don’t want the children to retain the ideas that were bears wear clothes, live in houses, and speak like people. So how do children sort out these ideas when we read these stories or do they fully sort them out? Dr. Weisberg: [03:57] It’s a really interesting set of questions. And the first thing I want to point out is that it’s not just children that have this problem. So one of the things that fascinates me about this area of research is that this is something that we all do from very little children way on up to us grown people have the same problem. It’s called the reader’s dilemma is what you just described. It’s the idea of how do you sort out which parts of a fictional story need to remain nearly fictional within that fictional world in which parts of the story can fruitfully be applied to the real world. So I just want to start by pointing out that that’s not a problem that goes away. So it is a problem that we get…well in some cases we get better at solving. There’s some very famous cases and people making these sorts of confusions right up through adulthood that I enjoy talking about. Dr. Weisberg: [04:44] But in terms of children, there are really two main ways that children learn how to sort through this readers dilemma. One is that they use their existing background knowledge. So if you have a book where a character does something that they already know to be impossible, like blip out of existence in one place and suddenly reappear somewhere else, you know by some people would say even in infancy, but certainly by three, four or five years old, they know that that’s not something that can really happen. And so they’re pretty good at figuring out that those sorts of events should remain just in the fictional story. Now the problem with that method of sorting things out of course, is that their background knowledge is not as rich or deep or accurate as adults background knowledge. So that is where some confusion’s can sometimes creep in or they can start doubting a little bit their background knowledge if something is presented very vividly in a story, but that’s the first method and usually for the most part it works pretty well and also again the method that we tend to use as adults. You know, we sort of check it against your background knowledge. Does that pass the smell test? Is that something that seems like it happened in reality, you know? Okay, I’ll let that through. And then the second method is that they rely on the adults around them like they do for so many things. So often it’s the responsibility of parents, teachers or older siblings or other trusted adults to sort things out for kids in those cases where, I don’t want to say that they get entirely confused, but where they might start having doubts based on what they’re reading or seeing in a video. Jen: [06:13] Okay. So a couple things there. Firstly, you’ve tantalized us so effectively with those stories of how adults experience the readers dilemma. Can you give us one or two of those fabulous examples? Dr. Weisberg: [06:20] Yeah, absolutely. One of my favorite examples is from The Da Vinci Code; when that book was published, it’s now a number of years ago, so I’m not sure if your readers will remember, but the point of The Da Vinci Code is that the hero and heroine are on the search for the Holy Grail and there are some clues left in the text that the holy grail is located in this particular church in Scotland and the New York Times sent a reporter to this particular church and the staff, there reported this spike in visitor ship, that there are people who would go there having read the book and they would come there seriously reporting that they were looking for the Holy Grail. Now this is a little bit different than, Oh, you know, I heard about this interesting place in a book. Let me go see it in real life because it really does exist. Dr. Weisberg: [07:05] You know, they said there certainly was that and they got a bit of fame from the book and they saw some tourism increased because of just the mention of the place. But there were also people that the staff reported engaging with were very, very seriously engaged in the process of hunting for the grail based on the clues in this fictional book, you know, and that’s fairly extreme, right? You know, so these are mostly American tourists. This was a report from the Times as I said, so you have to go through some considerable time and expense to hunt for something on the basis of, you know, what on the cover it stated very clearly that this was a novel. So that’s one of the more famous cases from recent years. This is also something that happens a lot with actors and actresses. So you know, you watch a movie or an actor or actress will play a similar role a few times and people start thinking that that’s what that person is like in real life. Dr. Weisberg: [08:01] And I’m not saying that’s always false. That might be the case, but there are lots of famous cases like in the sixties, I believe one of the first medical dramas that was shown on TV Dr Marcus Welby md when the actor reported that he just got tons of mail asking him medical questions, you know, they thought that, well he might know something about medicine because he plays one on TV, which is ludicrous if you think about it, but again, it points out this really interesting continuity between what children are doing and the ways that they’re sorting things out and what adults are doing. Jen:[08:31] Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. As you were explaining about The Da Vinci Code, I was thinking the church in Scotland should have had the Monty Python and the Holy Grail video playing on repeat once they got there…. Dr. Weisberg: [08:40] Oh, that would have been brilliant. No – it’s not here. Wrong castle. And then we’ll just arrest everybody. And then stop. Jen: [08:47] Yeah, right then and there. Okay. Well cool. Thank you for that. That makes a lot of sense. So you said that there are two ways that children start to sort this out for themselves. The first is experience and it makes a lot of sense to me if they’ve never had the experience of walking through a wall, they sort of assume that nobody can walk through walls, which I guess is a reasonable way of thinking about the world. And the second thing you said is that they look to their parents to help sort this out, but I’m just thinking about the dentist thing. I might read that…I haven’t read the book, but I might read it to my daughter to explain what the dentist is like, but I wouldn’t necessarily go ahead and say. But you know, bears don’t really wear clothes and live in houses and I’m not sure she would ask me, “Mama do bears were clothes?” Because she’s never seen a bear. She has no experience with that. So how do they make that leap and how to parents help that process or, or it seems like I’m not helping that process. Dr. Weisberg: [09:34] Well, on the one hand I would say to you and to your listeners, this is not something to worry about. Jen: [09:39] Yeah. No, I’m not worried. I’m just curious. Dr. Weisberg: [09:42] So you know, kids don’t get to the age of 10 or 12 and still harbors sort of deep confusion about bears living in houses because again, the two processes are still at work, right? So your daughter might not have seen a bear, you know, live and in person, but she’s seen lots of animals. She probably knows kind of what a bear is from pictures and generally knows that they don’t tend to speak like humans or they’ve seen dogs even if you don’t have a pet at home or you’ve seen them out on the street and so you have enough experience with nonhuman animals I should say, to know that they don’t speak like we do or live in houses or wear clothes. So there is some of that prior knowledge that’s able to kick in there. And also on the converse, yes, it’s true that you’re not necessarily telling your child explicitly, okay, in this story, the bears live in houses, but they don’t really live in houses. Dr. Weisberg: [10:28] But what you are doing is you’re emphasizing the message that you do want her to get from that story. So by the very things that you are saying and are not saying, so the things that you are emphasizing as opposed to things you’re not emphasizing, will send the message what’s important in this story for her to take out. And I know a lot of parents do that sort of thing. They’ll pick up books like this or you know, books on having a younger sibling for instance, and spend a lot of time talking about the theme from that book that you feel is really important for your child. And so they’ll learn that that’s the direction in which they should take their interpretation of the book based on your emphasis. Jen: [11:02] Okay, got it. Yeah. And so, so often in parenting it seems we find that by focusing on one thing, we sort of automatically don’t focus on something else and that that focus of attention is a very powerful tool and signal to our children. Dr. Weisberg:
Transcript Jen: [00:38] Hi, this is Jen. Before we start on today’s episode, I just wanted to take a minute to let you know that as part of my research for this episode on what children learn through reading fictional books, I ended up looking at a lot of different kinds of books for children aged roughly between toddlerhood and elementary school, and I compiled them into a list of more than 100 books that you can use to support your children’s learning on a host of subjects related to math, science, empathy, being persistent in the face of failure, multicultural issues, and many other topics as well. If you already subscribed to the show and my website, then you actually already got the list with your newsletter from last week. Unfortunately, subscribing through itunes or other platforms doesn’t count because I don’t get any information from them on how to reach you, so if you don’t already subscribe or if you’re subscribed through another platform, then head on over to YourParentingMojo.com forward slash reading books and sign up on that page and then the report will be emailed right to you. Thanks again for listening and enjoy the interview with Dr Deena Weisberg. Jen: [01:38] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We’ve done a couple episodes on reading by now. Episode three, which seems so long ago, was one where we asked whether you might have missed the boat on teaching your toddler to read. Of course, we know you’ve only missed the boat on that if you think that sitting your child in front of a video so they can recite the words they see without really understanding them counts as reading much more recently in episode 48, we talked with Dr Laura Frye and about the benefits of shared reading with your child and how to do that according to best practices from the research literature I’ve mentioned to those of you who subscribe to my newsletter that I had been working on an episode related to storytelling for a while as in telling stories without books and also making up stories, but I realized I needed a bridge from where we’ve been to where we want to go. Jen: [02:23] I wanted to know more about what children learn from the stories we read to them, and boy, do we have someone who can help us with that today. We’re here with Dr. Deena Weisberg, a senior fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr Weisberg earned her PhD in Psychology from Yale University and in her postdoc work at Rutgers University and also at Temple with Dr Roberta Golinkoff, with whom we spoke in episode 10 on her book becoming brilliant when I started researching what children learn from reading, I found an absolutely epic paper that Dr Weisberg co-authored with five pages of references in tiny text that describes and how children learn from reading fiction, so I knew we’d found the right person to speak with us. She’s also the parent of a five year old and an 18 month old, and has gamely agreed to talk with us today even though her nanny called in sick, so she’s in the thick of this parenting thing with us as well. Welcome Dr Weisberg. Dr. Weisberg: [03:15] Thank you so much, Jen. It’s really a pleasure to be here and talk with you this afternoon. Jen: [03:19] So it wasn’t until I started reading your paper that I realized what a really weird and strange thing it is that we ask of children. We read fiction to them and particularly fiction with some kind of message that we want them to internalize. And in your paper, you give the example of, I hope I’m saying this correctly, the Berenstain Bears visit to the dentist, which we assume is designed to help young children understand and get comfortable with what happens when they go to the dentist, but somehow we don’t want the children to retain the ideas that were bears wear clothes, live in houses, and speak like people. So how do children sort out these ideas when we read these stories or do they fully sort them out? Dr. Weisberg: [03:57] It’s a really interesting set of questions. And the first thing I want to point out is that it’s not just children that have this problem. So one of the things that fascinates me about this area of research is that this is something that we all do from very little children way on up to us grown people have the same problem. It’s called the reader’s dilemma is what you just described. It’s the idea of how do you sort out which parts of a fictional story need to remain nearly fictional within that fictional world in which parts of the story can fruitfully be applied to the real world. So I just want to start by pointing out that that’s not a problem that goes away. So it is a problem that we get…well in some cases we get better at solving. There’s some very famous cases and people making these sorts of confusions right up through adulthood that I enjoy talking about. Dr. Weisberg: [04:44] But in terms of children, there are really two main ways that children learn how to sort through this readers dilemma. One is that they use their existing background knowledge. So if you have a book where a character does something that they already know to be impossible, like blip out of existence in one place and suddenly reappear somewhere else, you know by some people would say even in infancy, but certainly by three, four or five years old, they know that that’s not something that can really happen. And so they’re pretty good at figuring out that those sorts of events should remain just in the fictional story. Now the problem with that method of sorting things out of course, is that their background knowledge is not as rich or deep or accurate as adults background knowledge. So that is where some confusion’s can sometimes creep in or they can start doubting a little bit their background knowledge if something is presented very vividly in a story, but that’s the first method and usually for the most part it works pretty well and also again the method that we tend to use as adults. You know, we sort of check it against your background knowledge. Does that pass the smell test? Is that something that seems like it happened in reality, you know? Okay, I’ll let that through. And then the second method is that they rely on the adults around them like they do for so many things. So often it’s the responsibility of parents, teachers or older siblings or other trusted adults to sort things out for kids in those cases where, I don’t want to say that they get entirely confused, but where they might start having doubts based on what they’re reading or seeing in a video. Jen: [06:13] Okay. So a couple things there. Firstly, you’ve tantalized us so effectively with those stories of how adults experience the readers dilemma. Can you give us one or two of those fabulous examples? Dr. Weisberg: [06:20] Yeah, absolutely. One of my favorite examples is from The Da Vinci Code; when that book was published, it’s now a number of years ago, so I’m not sure if your readers will remember, but the point of The Da Vinci Code is that the hero and heroine are on the search for the Holy Grail and there are some clues left in the text that the holy grail is located in this particular church in Scotland and the New York Times sent a reporter to this particular church and the staff, there reported this spike in visitor ship, that there are people who would go there having read the book and they would come there seriously reporting that they were looking for the Holy Grail. Now this is a little bit different than, Oh, you know, I heard about this interesting place in a book. Let me go see it in real life because it really does exist. Dr. Weisberg: [07:05] You know, they said there certainly was that and they got a bit of fame from the book and they saw some tourism increased because of just the mention of the place. But there were also people that the staff reported engaging with were very, very seriously engaged in the process of hunting for the grail based on the clues in this fictional book, you know, and that’s fairly extreme, right? You know, so these are mostly American tourists. This was a report from the Times as I said, so you have to go through some considerable time and expense to hunt for something on the basis of, you know, what on the cover it stated very clearly that this was a novel. So that’s one of the more famous cases from recent years. This is also something that happens a lot with actors and actresses. So you know, you watch a movie or an actor or actress will play a similar role a few times and people start thinking that that’s what that person is like in real life. Dr. Weisberg: [08:01] And I’m not saying that’s always false. That might be the case, but there are lots of famous cases like in the sixties, I believe one of the first medical dramas that was shown on TV Dr Marcus Welby md when the actor reported that he just got tons of mail asking him medical questions, you know, they thought that, well he might know something about medicine because he plays one on TV, which is ludicrous if you think about it, but again, it points out this really interesting continuity between what children are doing and the ways that they’re sorting things out and what adults are doing. Jen:[08:31] Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. As you were explaining about The Da Vinci Code, I was thinking the church in Scotland should have had the Monty Python and the Holy Grail video playing on repeat once they got there…. Dr. Weisberg: [08:40] Oh, that would have been brilliant. No – it’s not here. Wrong castle. And then we’ll just arrest everybody. And then stop. Jen: [08:47] Yeah, right then and there. Okay. Well cool. Thank you for that. That makes a lot of sense. So you said that there are two ways that children start to sort this out for themselves. The first is experience and it makes a lot of sense to me if they’ve never had the experience of walking through a wall, they sort of assume that nobody can walk through walls, which I guess is a reasonable way of thinking about the world. And the second thing you said is that they look to their parents to help sort this out, but I’m just thinking about the dentist thing. I might read that…I haven’t read the book, but I might read it to my daughter to explain what the dentist is like, but I wouldn’t necessarily go ahead and say. But you know, bears don’t really wear clothes and live in houses and I’m not sure she would ask me, “Mama do bears were clothes?” Because she’s never seen a bear. She has no experience with that. So how do they make that leap and how to parents help that process or, or it seems like I’m not helping that process. Dr. Weisberg: [09:34] Well, on the one hand I would say to you and to your listeners, this is not something to worry about. Jen: [09:39] Yeah. No, I’m not worried. I’m just curious. Dr. Weisberg: [09:42] So you know, kids don’t get to the age of 10 or 12 and still harbors sort of deep confusion about bears living in houses because again, the two processes are still at work, right? So your daughter might not have seen a bear, you know, live and in person, but she’s seen lots of animals. She probably knows kind of what a bear is from pictures and generally knows that they don’t tend to speak like humans or they’ve seen dogs even if you don’t have a pet at home or you’ve seen them out on the street and so you have enough experience with nonhuman animals I should say, to know that they don’t speak like we do or live in houses or wear clothes. So there is some of that prior knowledge that’s able to kick in there. And also on the converse, yes, it’s true that you’re not necessarily telling your child explicitly, okay, in this story, the bears live in houses, but they don’t really live in houses. Dr. Weisberg: [10:28] But what you are doing is you’re emphasizing the message that you do want her to get from that story. So by the very things that you are saying and are not saying, so the things that you are emphasizing as opposed to things you’re not emphasizing, will send the message what’s important in this story for her to take out. And I know a lot of parents do that sort of thing. They’ll pick up books like this or you know, books on having a younger sibling for instance, and spend a lot of time talking about the theme from that book that you feel is really important for your child. And so they’ll learn that that’s the direction in which they should take their interpretation of the book based on your emphasis. Jen: [11:02] Okay, got it. Yeah. And so, so often in parenting it seems we find that by focusing on one thing, we sort of automatically don’t focus on something else and that that focus of attention is a very powerful tool and signal to our children. Dr. Weisberg: