What do you think of my teachers?

5-year-old boys and their parent

This study will take place on a video call, live with a researcher! Clicking on the “Schedule a time to participate” button will send you to an online calendar where you can select a date and time that works for you. On the call, the researcher will show your child stories about different teachers and ask your child to determine how good or bad the teachers are. While they are participating, you will be asked to wear headphones so that you don’t hear your child’s responses to our questions. Then it will be your turn to do the study! After both of you go through the study, the session will end with a parent questionnaire that asks you questions about you and your child's daily life.

In this study, we are interested in understanding how children think about—and learn from—different kinds of teachers. Specifically, we ask children to evaluate teachers who use different strategies when choosing puzzles for a student. While teachers often provide direct instruction to their students to teach them, they also sometimes teach by creating different kinds of learning environments for the child to work independently. We are also interested in understanding what parents think about the same teachers, so we ask the parent to do the study as well. It's important to know how a child evaluates (or thinks about) their teacher, because we know from past research that if a child evaluates a teacher poorly (e.g., they think that teacher is uninformative or unhelpful), they may be less willing to learn from that teacher in the future. We hope our research helps us understand how to create the best learning environments for children to learn from.

60-75 minutes

Participants will be compensated with a $20 Tango gift card to be redeemed at your choice of vendors including Target, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc. After the study, we will send the gift card to you via email directly from the Tango website. To be eligible for compensation, the child needs to be in the age range and appear on camera, and both parent and child must participate in the study in English.