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 incl