Question: what kind of experiments have you done?

Birsu Kandemirci answered on 26 Nov 2021:

I have conducted many different experiments and they mainly involved working with young children (ages 2 to 8 years). I will try to summarise them to not bore you with all the details, but here are a few of these experiments:

When I was researching children’s creativity, I focused specifically on their verbal creativity (because there are many different ways in which you can be creative, such as how you paint, how you play music, even how you dance!). For my experiment, I used story cubes (9 different cubes with different pictures on each side). I asked 5- to 7-year-old children to roll these cubes and tell me a story based on the pictures that they rolled, but they did so in different conditions: They told a story on their own, another story where they collaborated with a classmate, and another one where they used a mobile app instead of the physical cubes. I also asked them to tell me a story where they didn’t use the cubes at all (so they just made up a story about whatever topic they liked). I would think having cubes would help them tell longer stories, but in fact they were more motivated to tell a long story when they didn’t use the cubes. However, their stories were more inventive when they used the cubes because they needed to tell a story that combined the pictures together (sometimes the pictures were very irrelevant :D), rather than having the freedom of telling a story about whatever they wanted (some of them told well-known stories too). Also, they told longer stories when collaborating with a friend, but they tended to repeat each other a lot rather than coming up with new ideas (which is understandable). Finally, using a technological device didn’t make a difference in terms of their performance. It was a very interesting and fun study!

For my postdoctoral (research that you do after you finish your PhD), I worked on children’s language skills and their social and cognitive skills, such as being able to understand other people’s ways of thinking. We did three different experiments in this project. One was what is called a longitudinal study. A longitudinal study means that you examine the same participants in different time points (for example, imagine I did an experiment with you now, and 1 year later to see the differences in your performance). The second study we conducted was an intervention (or a training study) where we aimed to teach children how to use a linguistic structure (complement clauses) more effectively to see its impact on their perspective-taking skills. Finally, we conducted a cross-linguistic study (comparing the abilities of children who speak different languages) to better understand the impact of language on our social skills. In fact, I am currently writing the results of this final study to be published in an academic journal. I am also planning a follow-up study to this one to better understand the results that we found.

I have also supervised my masters students to research children’s humour understanding skills. Because of COVID-19, this study was done online instead of taking place in children’s schools or in a lab. It was a great experience to see that children as young as 4 years old can actually complete a study online. We found that as children got older, they were more likely to distinguish between funny videos and videos that did not have a humorous element in them. But their parents’ humour styles did not seem to impact what type of videos children found funny. We also want to follow up this study to better understand what other factors might impact children’s humour understanding.

This was a long answer, but I hope it gave you some ideas about the kinds of experiments that I have conducted. I hope you find child development research interesting and maybe in the future you might want to research it yourself 🙂 Thank you for your great question 🙂