Coloring Book: A tool for testing language comprehension with young children

The Coloring Book is a digital application that allows researchers to design and use various tests for language comprehension. The idea behind the Coloring Book method is that coloring pages cab be used to test comprehension of words and grammatical rules, better than pictures. In this method, children are presented with digital coloring pages, and hear or read sentences that instruct them which items they should color. For example, “the table is red”, “the red monkey is running”, “the smallest giraffe is green”, etc. Coloring the correct item indicates with high reliability that the children understand these words or grammatical constructions.

In this tutorial, students will learn how to design and upload coloring pages into the Coloring Book application and create their own small test.

In the first part of the tutorial, we will discuss the idea behind the method, the advantages and the disadvantages. We will see some examples of previous research that was done with this method and think together whether it can be applied for the students’ own research.

In the second part students will learn how to work with the Coloring Book web-application and create their own mini test.

More information on the method can be found on:  coloringbook.wp.hum.uu.nl