DAPIE:  Interactive  Step-by-Step  Explanatory  Dialogues  to  Answer  Children’s  Why  and  How  Questions

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To identify effective techniques for answering children’s questions and for presenting explanations in a form that is comprehensible for children, we propose design guidelines for step-by-step interactive dialogues that scaffold children’s understanding on their own “why” and “how” questions. The guidelines present common conversational turns and strategies that can be employed to engage children in conversations, diagnose their understanding, and provide adequate interventions to help them overcome difficulties. To construct these guidelines, we first conducted an iterative inductive analysis on challenges and lessons from prior literature in child development, and conducted consultancy sessions with four child education experts to refine and validate our guidelines.

3.2.1 Constructing a Chain of Explanatory Units. To present explanations step-by-step, we suggest that explainers construct chains of explanatory units. Specifically, explainers should decompose the explanation into sub-units, identify relevant sub-units and their relationships, and present these units based on their identified relationships. By building relationships between concepts as they learn new concepts, explainers can help children achieve meaningful learning [2].

Decomposing Complex Explanations into Simpler Units When providing complex explanations, we suggest that explainers decompose the explanation into simpler units to help children understand complex concepts while avoiding significant cognitive load [23, 58]. By decomposing, explainers can lower complexity by unpacking the varying factors, entities, and relations contained in an explanation so that the child can process each one independently [31].

Identifying Relevant Units and Relations To aid and guide children’s reasoning, explainers should identify and denote the factors in an explanation that are necessary to achieve an understanding. By highlighting relevant factors for a child, the child can identify them as well, focus on them, and reason about the relationships between them [41].

Connecting the Units With the relevant units and relationships identified, explanation should be presented in a cumulative and causal manner. Specifically, an explanation should indicate how one unit in the explanation leads to the subsequent unit, since this guides children to carry out sophisticated reasoning on the relationships between the presented information [73]. Moreover, prior work demonstrated that children show greater curiosity and learning when explanations elaborate on causal connections [37].