Children aged 5-8 spend about three hours daily on devices, mostly watching videos. Parents want this time to benefit their child’s learning and emotional needs.
Research shows that when children actively engage with and think about the content they watch, they learn more in areas like self-confidence, recognizing emotions, and language skills. Many solutions encourage parents to watch and discuss media with their children, but this requires a lot of time and attention from parents, so children often watch alone instead.
Parents want technology to aid in developing children’s social-emotional skills, which are crucial for their growth. Effective social-emotional learning (SEL) programs often include activities for children outside the classroom and recommend active family involvement in their learning.
Apple researchers created a system called eaSEL. It generates reflection activities by integrating social-emotional learning (SEL) into children’s video-watching. Easel also helps parents and children discuss digital media without watching videos together.
Successful SEL (social-emotional learning) programs often include activities for children outside of school and recommend active family involvement in their learning. A practical at-home solution for promoting a child’s social-emotional growth should include (1) helping children practice SEL outside the classroom and (2) supporting and engaging parents with SEL programs.
Researchers developed and tested eaSEL (educational activities for social-emotional learning) for children aged 5-8. This system helps children engage with SEL topics while watching videos and provides conversation starters for parents to discuss with their children afterward without having to watch the videos themselves.
The system uses large language models (LLMs) to (1) identify SEL teaching moments in children’s videos, (2) create SEL activities for children (like drawing or making a video), and (3) generate conversation starters for parents and children.
Researchers tested the system’s performance using human evaluation metrics. They found that language models can effectively identify social-emotional skills in videos and generate suitable activities for children and conversation starters for parents. However, there are some shortcomings in detecting social skills and using child-appropriate language.
A study with 20 parent-child pairs was conducted to see how eaSEL impacts children’s engagement with social-emotional learning (SEL) and to understand parents’ views on the conversation starters. Results showed that children used more emotional words in story retellings after watching a video with an eaSEL activity compared to when they did not do any activity.
Additionally, children’s work from the activities and parent interviews indicated that children were engaged in SEL.
Authors noted, “Our work paves directions in how AI can support children’s social-emotional reflection of media and family connections in the digital age.”
Journal Reference:
- Jocelyn Shen, Jennifer King Chen, Leah Findlater, Griffin Dietz Smith. eaSEL: Promoting Social-Emotional Learning and Parent-Child Interaction Through AI-Mediated Content Consumption. DOI: 10.1145/3706598.3713405
Source: Tech Explorist
