Chat2Learn

Parental language input is essential for children's early language development, yet substantial disparities persist in both its quantity and quality. Most early language interventions adopt an explicit theory of change, educating parents about why and how to talk with their children, but such approaches tend to be resource-intensive, which limit their potential for scalability. The present study examines Chat2Learn, a low-cost, text-messaging tool that delivers open-ended prompts designed to elicit decontextualized conversations among parent-child dyads. Grounded in Cognitive Load Theory, Chat2Learn aims to reduce parents' extraneous load of generating conversational topics, thereby increasing opportunities for rich parent–child interactions. Participants were 63 parent–child dyads (children ages 3–6; 65.1% girls) recruited from preschool programs serving families in under-resourced neighborhoods in Chicago. They were randomly assigned to an experimental condition, where parents had access to Chat2Learn, or a business-as-usual control condition, during a 10-minute unstructured waiting period. Results showed that parents in the Chat2Learn condition spent less time inattentive or withdrawn during interactions (p = .05). Chat2Learn parents also produced higher-quality language input, including longer utterances, more unique words, and more open-ended questions, compared to controls (all p's < .05). No immediate differences emerged in children's language output. These findings provide a proof-of-concept that an intervention that takes a learning by doing approach in providing concrete support for parents with 'what to talk about' rather than abstract training in 'why" and "how' to talk can positively shift parent–child interaction patterns.

Correlational research shows that children whose parents talk with them more often have stronger vocabulary and language skills than children whose parents talk to them less frequently. To test whether this relationship is causal and to test the impact of a light-touch parent intervention, we designed and implemented a program ("Chat2Learn") to support parents in talking to their preschool-age children about words. Chat2Learn sent three text-based prompts per week for six months to a sample of nearly 600 low-income parents in the United States. Chat2Learn tested two different approaches. In approach one (the "definition approach") parents were prompted to talk with their child about what a word means. In approach two (the "conversation approach") parents were prompted not only to define the word but also to have a conversation using the word. Both approaches significantly increased children's vocabulary (effect sizes of .37 and .23, SDs respectively) for words contained in our intervention – or treatment words. Quantile regressions further showed that the definition approach significantly boosted vocabulary for non-treatment words for children at the upper end of the vocabulary distribution. The definition approach also reduced by .17 SD parents' beliefs that the child's intelligence is fixed and cannot be changed. Neither approach changed parents' feelings of stress, fatigue, or enjoyment of learning activities.