Friday November 13, 17.37.39

For the past year, Dr. Kathleen Roskos from John Carroll University, Dr. Karen Burstein, Director of the Southwest Institute for Families and Children and I have been researching use of eBooks with early literacy learners. Most recently, our team has started a study that will look at instructional interactions with eBooks that promote early literacy development and vocabulary. After viewing the David Merrill TED video and blogging about it in this post, I began to consider how our research team might incorporate these devices as part of our work. I was so excited about this possibility that I decided to email the Sifteo team to see if they might be open to collaborating with us on research in the future.

A day later, I received a very nice email back from David Merrill. He had some follow-up questions that he asked me to clarify, including, “what is the rough idea of how you’d use Siftables in your work?” This was a great question and in fact, very similar to the one I posed at the end of my February 22nd post. In order to provide an adequate response, Dr. Roskos, Dr. Burstein and I put our heads together and here is what our team has come up with.

We would like to use the Siftables in dynamic assessment situations to capture young children’s (ages 3-4) problem solving on literacy-related tasks, such as name-spelling, word-spelling, classifying (objects), story sequencing (retells), using new vocabulary words to complete sentence mazes and rapid automatized naming tasks (e.g., touching and naming a fixed set of objects (blocks) arrayed in rows). We initially would like to focus on two primary tasks (most likely): word building, using one’s own name letters as a start point and vocabulary building, using newly learned words to complete a sentence maze or create a probable passage. Please let us know if these are potential uses of Siftables. Our interest is in assessment/learning ‘tools’ that help us to see how young children process linguistic information to construct meanings.

With a little more direction in mind, we have responded back to the Sifteo team, and are now awaiting a response. Again I’m asking Raised Digital readers for some feedback. Do you think that Siftables have potential to be used for dynamic assessment purposes? How else do you see them being used?

Photo Credit: Friday November 13, 17.37.39 by JulianBleecker, on Flickr