Assessing Children’s Language Skills at a Distance: Does it Work?

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of using videoconferencing to assess children’s language skills. Participants were 6 typically developing monolingual English-speaking children, ages 3;0–5;11, from middle class families. Using a within-subjects design, the participants completed a story-retell task in both videoconferencing (VC) and face-to-face (F2F) conditions. During the task for each condition, children were presented with a story, along with a wordless book. In addition, 4 unfamiliar words were embedded within the story. Results showed that there were no significant differences in the microstructures of their narratives between F2F and VC conditions. Results also showed that children learned the target words in both conditions equally well. The findings in this study provide evidence that the VC and F2F conditions are comparable when administering the story-retell task to typically developing young children. Despite these preliminary findings, more research is needed to verify whether or not similar results would be found with young children with communication challenges.