Improving children's self-report in user-centered evaluations

Abstract

The envisaged contribution of the research presented in this paper is to improve users' self-report, a popular way to assess user experiences. The starting point of the research is an assessment of the previously presented Sensual Evaluation Instrument objects when used by children. Our assessment is set in a naturalistic setting, i.e. a primary school in southern Switzerland. Should the assessment be positive, we plan to explore further ways of using physical objects to support self-report. This should result in establishing a more robust version of self-report from children, which up to now suffers from being dependent on facilitators and requiring children to possess high levels of reflection and linguistic skills.

Engaging children in longitudinal behavioral studies through playful technologies

“…Playful Booth provides the ability to capture actual behaviors, thus minimizing reliance on self-reports, and in real time, two criticisms that have been repetitively raised in the IDC community [5,11]. Moreover, Playful Booth can monitor behaviors over prolonged periods of time [7], using limited resources, and thus temporal trends on overt behaviors may be established, for instance, in an attempt to establish the impact of a new technology or a new educational intervention on children's behaviors.…”

“…Next to concerns over the validity and reliability of self-report data, these instruments can only provide a momentary evaluation of the perceived social status of a child. The IDC community has repeatedly highlighted the need for instruments that can capture actual behaviors in real time [5,11].…”

“…Interviews, for instance, require well-developed linguistic skills [10] and ability to reflect over one's affective state [11,13]. Adding the fact that an interview is a time consuming process, children are often becoming tired and disengaged from it [10].…”

“…Researchers have thus devised a number of solutions to support children's verbalization and engagement in the interview process, ranging from drawing activities [22,4,19] to tangible objects as stimuli for emotional expression [11].…”

Designing playful, tangible self-report tools to give the child a voice

“…At the same time there is a demand for measuring the impact of play interventions from the perspective of a child. However, child self-report assessments can be challenging, for example because of suboptimal linguistic and reflection skills [11]. Furthermore, it is challenging to measure the effect of play interventions on large groups of younger children.…”