Assessing Inferencing Skills in Children Through the Lens of Dynamic Visual Narratives

The lack of research exploring the influence of dynamic visual narratives on inference skills prompted the present study with an aim to profile the inference skills in school children between the ages of 6 years and 9 years 11 months using dynamic visual narratives. A total of 80 participants were considered for the study. An animated story was designed as the dynamic visual narrative stimuli based on which an “inference task” was formulated, which included forced-choice questions and free-response questions. The responses of the forced-choice questions were analyzed quantitatively using one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), while the responses from the free-response questions were analyzed qualitatively. The results revealed an increase in inference skills with age with children using less seductive details, emergence of inductive inference, and providing multiple inferences. The inference profiles obtained from the study can serve as evidence for the development of bridging inference skills from dynamic visual narratives in children.