Real vs. Animated? When teaching about development does video format matter?

Language develops prenatally and throughout childhood and can significantly impact children’s abilities to produce and understand language throughout their life. The goal of this study is to find accessible ways to equip caregivers with resources to set their child up for future success in the comprehension and production of language. Parent’s understanding of childhood development is related to their child’s efficiency in moving through developmental stages, specifically in relation to the acquisition of language (Booth, 2018). Thus, we are creating a remote video-training process to teach parents about language development. Existing literature has shown the power of video-training such that parents who received training over video could implement new activities with their children, leading to an increased development of language-related skills (Blom-Hoffman, 2008). Current research about video formats, with college students, has found that participants learn best from combined audio and visual aspects that included social cues from footage of the instructor speaking (Brünken, 2002; Kizilcec, 2015). These features are able to be present in both live-action and animated formats. Therefore, this study focuses on finding out what video format is most beneficial to teach caregivers facts and activities related to children\u27s language development. We compare learning outcomes from videos of a real person presenting information compared to those with an animated character. Findings from this research will give insight to what could be a more efficient way of equipping parents to support their child in the process of being able to understand and produce language