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Guided reciprocal questioning to support children’s collaborative storytelling

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Abstract

Developing shared understanding is essential to productive collaboration where a product is jointly constructed. This is especially true when the different collaborators’ contributions need to build coherently on one another, as, for example, when making a story together. This study investigated whether encouraging children to engage in discussion through a Guided Reciprocal Peer Questioning (GRPQ) script whilst drawing together leads to better collaborative storytelling. Thirty-six 6–7 year old children used a computer-drawing application called KidPad to tell collaborative stories supported by interactive drawings, and were trained in the GRPQ script. Using a within-subjects design, it was shown that the GRPQ script promoted engagement in interactive discussion and led to the production of richer and more coherent collaborative stories. Furthermore, this benefit was often maintained once the explicit support was withdrawn. These findings suggest that the GRPQ script is an effective way to improve children’s collaborative storytelling and one that children can internalise and apply themselves.

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Notes

  1. Unfortunately, due to an oversight during the data collection in school, one extra group was allocated to the no prompts task first order.

  2. http://www.tinyplanets.com/ [Accessed 10 March 2011]

  3. Throughout children’s names are replaced with pseudonyms.

  4. We also tested if children answered the questions they were asked: total of 87% of the questions asked were answered during the no prompts story and 89% during the prompts story. Accordingly the same pattern of results was found for the number of answers given. There were significantly more answers given during the prompts task than in the no prompts task and during the no prompts script, significantly more answers were given by the children who were given the prompts script first.

  5. The same pattern was found for the total number of propositions in the stories: during the prompts task, the children produced stories which included significantly more propositions than during the no prompts task; moreover, during the no prompts task, the children who were given the prompts script first produced stories containing more propositions than those who started without it.

  6. The data on the total number of question presented an outlier (3.2 SD away from the mean, mean = 55.67), which made the data not normally distributed. Once the outlier was removed s, all data met the requirement for parametric testing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK

    Giulia Gelmini-Hornsby

  2. School of Psychology and Learning Sciences Research Institute, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK

    Shaaron Ainsworth & Claire O’Malley

Authors
  1. Giulia Gelmini-Hornsby
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  2. Shaaron Ainsworth
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  3. Claire O’Malley
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Correspondence to Shaaron Ainsworth.

Appendix I

Appendix I

Table 7 Transcript and coding for evaluative richness and coherence in a collaborative story produced in a prompted session (Valerie and Jim)
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Gelmini-Hornsby, G., Ainsworth, S. & O’Malley, C. Guided reciprocal questioning to support children’s collaborative storytelling. Computer Supported Learning 6, 577–600 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-011-9129-5

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