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Shy kids do language tasks differently: A new study
18.10.2023 07:40
Updated: 13.05.2024 21:22
A recent study found that shyness can affect how well a child does in language tests, depending on how much social interaction the test needs.
Shy kids tend to be quieter and less talkative in everyday life, and this can make it tough to assess their language skills accurately.
Let's find out more about how it affects their academic results.
More about the experiment
The experiment involved 120 children between 17 and 42 months old with different temperaments.
The kids did three language tasks that needed various levels of talking with others: a looking task, a pointing task, and a production task where they had to say the answer.
Each kid was asked to find a known object in a set of pictures, and the tasks were randomized to get fair results.
Parents told the researchers how shy their kids were using a questionnaire.
The results showed that shyer children had a harder time with the production task where they had to talk.
But all children did well with the pointing task, no matter how shy they were.
The looking task gave mixed results, showing that shy kids were sometimes more accurate but less likely to respond.
When kids are given assessments to check their language skills, clinicians and teachers should remember the child's shyness level, perhaps using tasks that are less burdensome for them."
Why it's important
Understanding how shyness affects a child's performance in language tests can help professionals make these assessments better and understand a child's language development more completely.
In the future, Kucker and her team plan to study how shy and less-shy kids do on standardized language tests.
