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Paper Ladder: A Rating Scale to Collect Children's Opinion in User Studies

Cristina Sylla, Ahmed Sabbir Arif , Elena Márquez Segura, & Eva Irene Brooks


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Paper Ladder is a low-cost, light-weight, and paper-based variant of the Sticky Ladder rating scale (Airey et al., 2002) to collect children's preference in user studies. This paper version revamps the original, effective but arguably impractical evaluation method by making it more accessible to researchers.

Pilot Study

We conducted a longitudinal pilot study, where 45 second-grade students (on average, 7 years old) used Paper Ladder to rate their preference of different types of correctness feedback in a math app for touchscreen tablets (Figure 1). Results suggested that it could be a valuable instrument for conducting user studies with young children. Read the following extended abstract and watch the video for further details.

Cristina Sylla, Ahmed Sabbir Arif, Elena Márquez Segura, Eva Irene Brooks. 2017. Paper Ladder: A Rating Scale to Collect Children's Opinion in User Studies. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2017). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 96, 8 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3098279.3122139
Video Figure 1: A child using a Paper Ladder to rate diffrent types of correctness feedback in a math app.

Final Study

In this study, we studied two accepted evaluation tools: the Five Degrees of Happiness, and the Sticky Ladder rating scale; together with the Paper Ladder. Thirty-six preschoolers rated two creative and play activities ("Painting" and "Construction Blocks") and a game ("Musical Chairs") in terms of difficulty, enjoyment, and preference. Drawing from theories of embodied and distributed cognition, we performed a video analysis of the children's interactions with these tools, focusing on how each tool supported the children's cognitive processes and communication with the researcher. Find the full paper below.

Cristina Sylla, Elena Márquez Segura, Akeiylah DeWitt, Ahmed Sabbir Arif, Eva Irene Brooks. 2019. Fiddling, Pointing, Hovering, and Sliding: Embodied Actions with Three Evaluation Tools for Children. In Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY 2019). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 59-72. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3311350.3347170

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