‘Lift-the-flap’ books; toddlers passionately love them for their interactive fun. Parents hate them because they’ve read them 50,000 times and they already know that Spot is NOT behind that door. But a recent study has thrown up some more concerning issues around these books.
Does interaction help them learn language?
Researchers from the Royal Holloway, University of London decided to run an experiment on these books versus regular picture books.
“We wanted to test how a commercially-available book with or without flaps affected two-year-olds’ learning of a new word for an unfamiliar object,” Dr Jeanne Shinskey told The Telegraph.
The psychologists wanted to find out if including the interactive features like flaps or texture also helped children to absorb new language from the books.
Source: Youtube
The experiment
31 toddlers were split into two groups. They were each given identical books, but one set of books had flaps and the other did not. Each group looked through the books with a researcher. Each group were asked to look through a book with a researcher that contained nine objects including a new fruit they had not seen before – a starfruit.
They were then asked by the researchers to identify a starfruit. They found that 68 percent of the toddlers who looked at the book without flaps correctly remembered the starfruit compared to just 30 percent of those who were given books with flaps.
The researchers said that the book’s interactive features seemed to distract children rather than engaging them in learning.
“If parents want their children to learn factual information about the world from books, it doesn’t appear to help to make books more toy-like by adding 3D features,” Dr Jeanne Shinskey told The Telegraph.
“This seems to enhance their tendency to treat books as just another type of physical toy, rather than a tool for learning.
“As the findings suggest young children can find these features in a book distracting we would recommend having a range of books available so children learn to love reading as well as learning more about the world around them.”
But…
Obviously, I’m not a scientist, but it seems to me that anything that encourages children to engage in reading and teaches them to enjoy reading books can’t be a totally bad thing. Plus, I have a two-year-old and I can assure you that there is NO way you are just reading those books the one time. I have read every Spot and Maisy flap books so many times that both me and my daughter can recite along. So with that repetitive reading, it certainly does seem like information is getting through.
Anyway, if you’re concerned, don’t worry too much. Everyone knows that toddlers will destroy a flap book in around two minutes flat, anyway.
