ContextQ: Generated Questions to Support Meaningful Parent-Child Dialogue While Co-Reading

TL;DR

ContextQ is a tablet app that generates questions to help parents engage children in meaningful conversations during shared reading, improving dialogue quality and frequency.

Contribution

The paper introduces ContextQ, a novel system that uses auto-generated questions to support parent-child dialogue during co-reading, incorporating educator expertise into question generation.

Findings

Increased number of conversational turns between parent and child.

Deeper, more meaningful conversations related to child's everyday life.

System effectively guides parents in leading contextually relevant dialogue.

Abstract

Much of early literacy education happens at home with caretakers reading books to young children. Prior research demonstrates how having dialogue with children during co-reading can develop critical reading readiness skills, but most adult readers are unsure if and how to lead effective conversations. We present ContextQ, a tablet-based reading application to unobtrusively present auto-generated dialogic questions to caretakers to support this dialogic reading practice. An ablation study demonstrates how our method of encoding educator expertise into the question generation pipeline can produce high-quality output; and through a user study with 12 parent-child dyads (child age: 4-6), we demonstrate that this system can serve as a guide for parents in leading contextually meaningful dialogue, leading to significantly more conversational turns from both the parent and the child and deeper conversations with connections to the child's everyday life.