How to choose high-quality educational apps and programmes for children
This research review is based on a chapter that was previously published in Muller and Goldenberg (2022), a report in our ‘Education in Times of Crisis’ series.
Debates around screen time have long been dominated by strong positions and concerns around the right amount of screen time for young children but more recently, debates have moved on to try and understand the role of different forms of screen time for children’s development and learning.
Based on research from the science of learning, Hirsh-Pasek et al. (2015) outline four pillars of educational apps: active, engaged, meaningful and socially interactive and discuss how they relate to research on media use in young children. These are the criteria that apps have to fulfil in order to be considered ‘educational’. Reading through these criteria will help you to assess educational apps that you may want to use with your students in school and decide whether their educational value is high enough to include them in your teaching.
Active
Hirsh-Pasek et al. (2015) outline that children need to be active participants in their learning if it is to be effective. This does not relate to physical activity but rather the mental state of being ‘switched on’ and thinking actively.
Television and videos
Hassinger-Das et al. (2020) suggest that children benefit from actively watching television and videos, but they do not learn from passively watching videos. Children who interact with characters on television, repeat words, sing along or engage in thinking tasks show higher understanding of the taught content. Furthermore, interactive media can also help children to transferThe processes of applying learning to new situations knowledge from abstract objects on screens to real life, which young children have difficulty with when watching non-interactive videos due to the substantial cognitive resources this task demands (Kirkorian, 2018). This is because videos lack social cues such as shared gaze or calling children’s names. When videos contain such social cues (e.g. during a video chat with a known person), then toddlers show higher transfer abilities, which are lost when a recorded video using such cues is not responsive to children’s behaviour (Kirkorian, 2018).
E-books and apps
E-books can provide a range of additional features such as animated pictures, music or videos that can engage learners, help young children’s word learning and aid their understanding. Furthermore, e-books can be designed to foster interactions between educators and children, which can also enhance learning (Hassinger-Das et al., 2020). Shared reading and co-viewing, a process which can involve a range of activities, such as asking children open-ended questions, using ‘wh’ prompts (who, what, when where) or sentence completion are associated with improved language skills (Noble et al., 2019; Madigan et al., 2020). E-books can also give children control over their reading based on their developmental stage, which improves their involvement and learning (Hassinger-Das et al., 2020; Hirsh Pasek et al., 2015).
Overall, these studies suggest that active and interactive use of media, whether it is television or e-books and apps, can help young children’s learning. Watching videos or television passively, on the other hand, seems to have little effect on their learning.
- Engaged
The second pillar described by Hirsh-Pasek et al. (2015) relates to young children’s engagement in their digital learning. As is well-known from the educational research literature, children learn better when they are interested and engaged in their learning (Lei et al., 2018).
Television and videos
Interactive television programmes that correspond to children’s developmental stage and are neither too easy nor too difficult are most likely to keep young children engaged. Furthermore, multiple repetitions of the same content during the same or multiple episodes can help children to transfer knowledge across contexts.
E-books and apps
As outlined above, e-books can contain very helpful features that can support young children’s reading comprehension. These features can also increase children’s engagement in the reading process (Hassinger-Das et al., 2020). However, if additional features distract children from the main storyline, they may do more harm than good.
Shared reading with e-books can benefit children if features support word learning or engage children in thinking that is related to the story (e.g. ‘wh’ questions or sentence completion, Reich and colleagues (2016). If, however, the additional questions are unrelated to the main storyline (e.g. asking children to find words that start with a specific letter), they can impede comprehension. Young children who have engaged in shared reading with an adult have been found to become more independent e-book readers. Furthermore, children have been found to be more engaged in the reading process if they are provided with immediate feedback, such as when answering a question relating to the text they are reading (Hassinger-Das et al., 2020). Finally, Hassinger-Das and colleagues (2020) suggest that programmes and applications which foster long-term engagement, for example those that allow children to work on a building project for a longer period of time, can increase engagement, especially if they allow children to develop their project according to their own interests.
In sum, engagement is as important in online learning as it is during face-to face learning and it can be fostered through programmes and applications that take children’s current level of development into account and provide helpful but not distracting features.
- Meaningful
Much like in face-to-face learning, it is important that new learning through digital technologies is connected to students’ previous knowledge to help embed it and enhance storage in long-term memory, ultimately facilitating its retrieval and use across contexts.
Television
Some research has found that co-viewing of videos and television shows with an adult and engaging in a dialogic process can help children in a similar way to co-reading, while others suggest that similar benefits cannot be observed for shared viewing (Hassinger-Das et al., 2020). Samudra et al. (2019) found that it is only auditory, not audiovisual word learning that was enhanced during co-viewing and argue that this is likely due to the fact that this was the mode co-viewers used to communicate with the young children. As noted by Kirkorian (2018), young children find it difficult to transfer knowledge from the screen to real life but it has been found that familiarity with characters on the screen (e.g. if children watch the same programme regularly) or having a character from a programme as a toy and acting out some of the action while watching the programme can help children to make these connections. Providing information about characters in a programme prior to their first appearance can also help create this feeling of familiarity as can the repetition of episodes, so children become familiar with its format and can then apply learning to other contexts (Hassinger-Das et al., 2020).
E-books and apps
Again, quite like in face-to-face learning and as outlined above for television, repetitions can help children’s learning when engaging with new apps or e-books. By repeating the use of crucial features of a new app, children become familiar with them, freeing up cognitive load before they move on to new learning content. Just like when reading traditional books, caregivers and teachers can help connect stories in e-books to children’s previous lived experiences, which helps their learning (Hassinger-Das et al., 2020). While apps may not be able to relate specifically to children’s lived experiences, they can ask children to connect story content to their own environment (e.g. objects in their room or on the screen).
Overall, this brief overview suggests that children can learn from television, e-books
and apps if the content is connected to their lived experiences and context. Caregivers
can individualise e-book reading experiences by relating content to children’s personal
lives while apps can connect learning to children’s surroundings. Repetition is also
important to familiarise children with characters in apps, programmes or books and
having tangible toys that correspond to television programmes they see on screen can
help them to transfer learning.
- Socially interactive
The final pillar presented by Hirsh-Pasek et al. (2015) relates to reciprocal social
interaction. Starting from birth, children take social cues from their environment,
sharing their gaze, repeating actions and gestures that others show to them and
taking turns even before they are able to fully articulate their words. Rather than
merely the number of words children hear, it is the interaction with their caregivers’,
the extensiveness of their caregivers’ responses and their turn-taking behaviour that
predicts children’s language development.
Television and video
The lack of these social interactions in videos is the reason why younger children
below the age of 2.5 are generally unable to learn from videos (Whitebread et al.,
2005; Hassinger-Das et al., 2020). Linguistic research has shown that children who hear
two languages in real life learn to discriminate between sounds in the two different
languages while those that only hear the two languages over video do not, which has
also been confirmed for vocabulary learning (Kuhl et al., 2003; Krcmar et al., 2007;
Roseberry et al., 2009). However, more recent research focusing on interactive video
conversations have shown that such video-mediated interactions can indeed support
children’s learning (Roseberry et al., 2014; Myers et al., 2016)
E-books and apps
The research reviewed by Hassinger-Das et al. (2020) appears to suggest that the
reaction of others to one’s own actions (known as social contingency) makes a bigger
difference to children’s learning than the medium these exchanges occur in. A study
comparing shared book reading in a live condition, via video chat and a pre-recorded
condition found that learning outcomes were comparable across the live and the video
chat condition but not the pre-recorded condition. Similarly, another study found
that children’s individual use of a geography app led to worse learning outcomes
than a physical lesson but when a lesson was taught via the app these differences
disappeared. Some studies have found that individual e-book reading can lead to a
weaker emotional response than shared reading with an adult (Hassinger-Das et al.,
2020).
The presence of another child in real life while learning from an app can also enhance
children’s learning, suggesting that social presence makes a difference and children
can learn equally well through video and face-to-face interactions but learn best when
engaging in reciprocal social interaction. (Hassinger-Das et al., 2020).
This overview of research on learning with media in young children highlights the
importance of social interaction for children’s learning and development. It was
shown that medium is less important than social interaction, suggesting that distance
learning via video conferencing could be an option, even for young children, and
that children from the age of three upward may be able to learn successfully from
interactive videos.
Key takeaways:
- Apps and programmes should actively involve children by encouraging them to sing along, repeat or link learning on the screen to their own environment.
- Apps and programmes should engage children in their learning but do not distract from it. Follow-on questions should be related to the storyline rather than features of the word, for example.
- Apps and programmes should be meaningful and allow children to connect new learning to past experiences.
- To support children’s learning, apps and devices should provide opportunities for social interaction.
References
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Kirkorian H (2018) When and how do interactive digital media help children connect what they see on and off the screen?. Child Development Perspectives 12(3): 210–214.
Krcmar M, Grela B, Lin K at al. (2007) Can toddlers learn vocabulary from television? An experimental approach. Media Psychology 10(1): 41–63.
Kuhl PK, Tsao FM and Liu HM (2003) Foreign-language experience in infancy: Effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100(15): 9096–9101.
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Roseberry S, Hirsh-Pasek K, Parish-Morris J et al. (2009) Live action: Can young children learn verbs from video? Child Development 80: 1360–1375.
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Samudra PG, Flynn RM and Wong KM (2019). Coviewing Educational Media: Does Coviewing Help Low-Income Preschoolers Learn Auditory and Audiovisual Vocabulary Associations?. AERA Open 5(2): DOI: 10.1177/2332858419853238.
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