PhD Scientific Days 2025

Poster Session I. - N: Health Sciences

Developing Thinking Skills Through Fairy Tales Among Children with Atypical Development

Name of the presenter

Kiss Kíra Laura

Institute/workplace of the presenter

Semmelweis Egyetem Pető András Faculty - student

Authors

Ms. Kíra Laura Kiss¹

1: Semmelweis Egyetem Pető András Faculty

Text of the abstract

Fairy tales are key to children's development because they entertain, but also develop language, emotional and social skills. Fairy tales are an effective development tool that helps children to think through the consequences of their choices. The innovative effects of fairy tales and the pedagogical effectiveness of storytelling and oscillatory stimuli have been widely discussed in the past, and how their use influences children's understanding of fairy tales. However, little or no thesis research has been carried out on children with atypical developmental trajectories who receive conductive education. The present research is based on longitudinal studies using native language interventions and level assessment tests (such as DIFER empirical inference, GMP-12 text comprehension scale) with three preschool children with atypical developmental trajectories. We used methods and measurement tools from previous similar research at the Faculty of András Pető at Semmelweis University, and thus in our study we evaluated the children's results using qualitative video and content analysis, which were analysed by independent observers based on the agreement of their responses, and we conducted a statistical analysis using quantitative methods to examine the difference between the way the two stories were read. The aim of our research was to further investigate the validity of the story inference task and to assess the suitability of the stories for group testing of other preschool children with atypical developmental milestones within the framework of the previously used test model, and whether they can adequately name and make up the errors mentioned in the story using neutralized or nanny language after listening to multiple stories with the same structure. Our results show that the quality of storytelling and the use of oscillatory stimuli affect children's attention, whereas the acquisition of eye contact was not shown to be related to children's performance on the story inference tasks. In children with atypical developmental trajectories, in group settings, children's performance on story association tasks was only marginally assessable and further development of this measure is recommended. Our results support that the nursery rhyming story reading method and oscillatory stimuli are the most appropriate to capture and sustain preschool children's attention.