Responses to problem solving across gender for four and five year-old preschool children.

Abstract

By Noelle Brown, Communication Sciences and Disorders; Monica Winkler, Communication Sciences and Disorders

Advisor: Rochel Lieberman

Presentation ID: PM_C04

Abstract: Children's understanding of emotions begins to develop during preschool (Pavarini, 2012). Preschool children can describe a relationship between a felt emotion and an event (Pavarini, 2012). and learn to identify causal relationships involving characters' goals, emotions, and desires (Filiatrault-Veilleux, 2016). The purpose of this study was to investigate differences between gender in the solutions provided to problem solving after retelling a story containing positive emotions and after retelling a story containing negative emotions. Participants were 22 preschool children between the ages of 4:1 to 5:3. There were 13 girls and 9 boys from preschools in Brooklyn and Staten Island, New York.. The children were told a total of four different stories that were enacted on a video with child actors. Two were narrated by the researcher and two were narrated by a novel voice delivered via headphones. Each story had a positive or negative outcome. The problem-solving questions were "What should he or she do?" and "What else?". The children's responses were measured by a rubric that quantified the relevance and linguistic expansion of the o child's solution by examining if it included character action and verbal responses. Data analysis focused on the total number of rubric points for males and female. Results of this study provide insight to possible differences across gender in the development of problem solving in stories with positive and negative emotions. These differences could support clinicians in talking to preschool boys and girls about problem solving stories containing these emotions.