Week 9 Flashcards
Features of touchscreen apps that maximise educational potential
As we touched on last week, the wide array of digital technologies available to children has expanded dramatically in the last five years. A key impetus behind this growth is the popularity of applications (apps). In the Apple Store alone there are over 2 million apps covering an ever-increasing range of genres, with 80,000 of those sitting within the guise of ‘education’. But the question is: Which of these apps are legitimately educational?
Your essential reading by Hirsh-Pasek et al. (2015) endeavours to answer this question by distilling research to define four pillars of learning that provide the basis from which to evaluate and develop apps. Read Putting education in ‘educational’ apps: Lessons from the science of learning (PDF 672 KB) Download Putting education in ‘educational’ apps: Lessons from the science of learning (PDF 672 KB) (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015, pp. 3–34) to help you match the following descriptions to a pillar of learning. Drag and drop the correct pillar of learning beside its definition. Select ‘Check answer’ to see if your pillars and definitions are matched correctly. After three incorrect attempts, you will be given the correct responses.
- Active involvement: Humans learn best when they are ‘minds-on’. This means we move beyond a simple swipe and scroll and actually manipulate the mind to do something.
- Engagement: Centres around focus and being free of distractions by peripheral elements. As the typical, modern environment of a child is littered by distraction, multitasking is a constant norm.
- Meaningful experiences: This is based on the quality and quantity of connections between the app experience and the wider experience of a child’s life (Gillette-Mallard, 2016). As Hirsh-Pasek et al. (2015, p. 13) note, ‘sustainable and useful learning comes from experiences that connect to our existing knowledge’.
- Social interaction: There is evidence to suggest that infants use statistical reasoning across a variety of realms. Other research has shown that when social cues are provided, infants perform better in complex situations. ‘Apps can exploit this through character responses to selections that the children make, through partner work on an app, or through video conferencing’ (Gillette-Mallard, 2016).
The science and hype surrounding the concept of ‘screen time’
In today’s increasingly digital world it’s virtually impossible, and potentially limiting, to eliminate screen time altogether. The idea of limiting ‘screen time’ elicits divisive responses, particularly in the area of psychological science. Etchells (2017) argues that the problem with the debate about screen time is that very often the arguments devolve into overly-simplistic scaremongering claims and the mere fact research in the field is relatively young, meaning that we are devoid of compelling evidence and conclusions. It has been surmised that screen time shouldn’t be seen as some kind of chemical that, when consumed, causes concrete physiological changes that can harm the body and cause a long-term dependency, rather, it should be viewed as a diverse and ever-changing part of daily life (Orben, 2018).
To this end, content matters, context matters and connections matter. So much so that in January 2018, the British Psychological Society (BPS) in its briefing paper ‘Changing behaviour: Children, adolescents and screen use’, called for new screen use guidelines to be built based on robust evidence. Their recommendations for research included the following (ScienceDaily, 2018):
The design of studies that identify causality (longitudinal and experimental manipulations if appropriate) and increase our understanding of when screen use is harmful and when it is beneficial. Increased qualitative methods to understand media practices and desires from digital media.
Your readings this week will help you delineate some of the hype from the science.
In Putting education in ‘educational’ apps: Lessons from the science of learning (PDF 672 KB) Download Putting education in ‘educational’ apps: Lessons from the science of learning (PDF 672 KB) (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015, pp. 3–34) you will explore a set of principles that will help guide you in evidence-based app development and a new standard for evaluating and selecting the most effective existing children’s apps.
Revise Paper as notes were deleted
The study in Almost being there: Video communication with young children (Links to an external site.) (Tarasuik et al., 2011, pp. 1–8) will help you consider whether video communication with children can approximate a physical presence such that familial relationships can be truly maintained by this means.
- physical proximity is necessary for young children to form an maintain a secure attachment with an adult
- during such time of separation, video may provide young children with the connection to their parents and assist the children by psychologically lessning the distance caues by geographical separation.
- young children treat people on video differently than people that they see face to face.
- Experiment - used separation and reunion paradign.
- Hyp: that children would remain content to be alone in the room for longer if their parent was virtually available to them and that the children would use the virtual presence of their parent as a secure base for exploration.
- 2 rooms - playroom and computer room with 3 cameras. - 45 kids,
- each parent child dyad participated in a separation and reunion protocol which was based on that used previously by Ainsworth Bell and Stayton.
- Protocal - free play - video seperation - reunion - non-video separation - reunion
- Coding - separation episodes - measure contentment duration, reunion episodes - proximity variable, comparison across episodes - play and interaction criterion.
- Results/Discussion - parental presence via video link is sufficient to allow young children to feel secure in an unfamiliar environment. duration of contentment, interaction with the parent, engagement in play and response to the reunion. - indicators of attachment security.
- children of all ages were content to be alone withou a parent physically present significantly longer in video separation than the non-video separation edpisode.
- revealed that children interacted slightly more with their paretn during the video separation episode, notable however, there was no significant difference between the two episodes in the percentage of time that children interacted with parents
- play was also an important measure in our study as it is an indicator of the extent to which a cirtual parental presence can subsitutde for a physical secure base for exploration. results indicated that children across all ages played for longer during the video separation than the non video separation.
- the failure to find differences in percentage of play between the video separation episode and the non-video separation episode may, however, be due to other differences in the nature of interaction in these two separation episodes.
- furthermore the interaction measure should be considered in any interpretation of how much children played. since video communication is still a relatively unusually activity in most households, the novelty of talking to a parent over a video link could be interpreted as play for many children.
- additionally, these may be subtleties of how one interactions, plays and talks with a parent when they are actually present rather than virtually present that accounts of rdifferences in play between these conditions
- observation of the reunions demonstrated that the younger participants were significantly more likely to move to contact their parent following the non-video separation than the video separation.
- results found compelling evidence that a parents virtual presence is sufficient to increase the level of security felt by young children with pre-existing strong attachments in an unfamiliar environment
- its possible that some children were happier during cirtual communication because the were distracted from their separation by the novelty of talking to a parent via video.
- future studies - include younger children, involved extended relatives rather than parents.
In Young children’s transfer of learning from a touchscreen device (Links to an external site.) (Huber et al., 2016, pp. 56–64), two experiments help you explore 4- to 6-year-old children’s ability to learn how to solve a problem on a touchscreen device and subsequently apply this learning in their interactions with physical objects. Upon reading this study ask yourself, are children capable of transferring learning from touchscreen devices?
- Plato - enforced learning will not stay in the mind, so avoid compulsion and let your childrens lesson take the form of play.
- Apple Ipads and similar mobile touchscreen device have made interactive media accessible to much younger children, largely because the fine motor skills needed to use traditional computers and video games are not necessary. - has over 80k apps.
- new set of worries related to childrens cognitive social, emotional, physical development.
- from a practical perspective, parents and educators should know if they can safely replace or augment physical games with these digital analogues.
- used the tower of hanoi puzzle because 1. single optimal solution path taht does not depend on the performance of a competitor 2. the standard physical disks of using a touchscreen app, the solution to the puzzle and the scoring methods for proficiency are id,entical which allowed to make straightforward comparisons 3. it can be used to assess problem solving in children as young as 4 years of age 4. is used to assess the same set of cognitive and executive functioning abilities that are used in games like checkers 5. pre and post intervention administrations of the TOK task have previously been used to successfully investigate other factors that can affect learning.
- Experiemnt 1 - 4 - 6 year olds - 3D then 2D then 3D - 50 children.
- Discussion Experiment 1 - transferred learning from the 3D to the 2D. baseline factor - as children learned how to solve the puzzle with the 3d version.
- experiment 2 - 4 - 6 year olds - 2D then 3D - prior exposie to the object does not matter.
General Discussion:
- 4 - 6 year old children improved at a problem-solving task throguh practice on a touchscreen device
- the extend of this improvement was similar to that o children who practiced only with a physical version. that is there was no evidence that children who practiced using the 3D puzzle performed any better on the final 3d trial than children who practiced using the 2d model/
- the learning benefits of touchscreen practice did not require an inital exposure to the 3d version of the puzzle.
Learning to solve problems from interactive media - preschoolers struggle to learn problem solving strategies from screen based media - participants successful learning regardless of training modality is consistent with work on the advantages of active vs passive learning - just presenting a task as a problem to be solved can encourage children to attend to and encode video in ways that promote learning - it is apparent why learning to solve problems using an interactive touchscreen app is effective. App use, almost by definition, requires consistent enngagement and because it is active tin nature, the requirement to appreciate solutions through passive vewiing is removed.
Social contingencry vs Contingency - it is well established that learning is enhanced when the learning context involves elaboration through social interaction - depite the benefirts of parasocial video interaction, no work to date has specifically examined if the benefits of contingent meda must be social in nature - recent evidence suggests that the most profound beenfit of including social elements into childrens digital experiences is not on learning to sovle problems per se, but on maintaining social relationships when physical presence is not possible
Executive functioning and problem solving - suggesting that screen media use negatively affects subsequent executive functioning - our findings demostrate that while some types of media consumption may negatively impact executive functioning, other types may instead offer, effective opportunities to practice and hone executive functioning skills
Conclusion - generalizing to other digital learning experiences - if skills can be learned from a touchscreen can these skills transfer to the real world - future research should evalutate the extent to which problem solving strategies learned digitally can be applied to new physical, non-isometric problems.
DB
Last week we examined the impact of children’s interaction with media and technology on cognitive development. This week we continue exploring young children’s use of media, with a focus on the impact of technology on education and interactions via video media.
As parents, educators and helping professionals it can be difficult to determine which apps can positively influence education. In the 1990’s, Baby Einstein video’s were purchased by parents in the hope that infants could accelerate their learning.
Later research identified that there was no educational benefit in these videos!
So how do we evaluate educational apps?
One suggestion is via the four pillars of learning which was covered in the Hirsh-Pasek et al (2015) article and the learning materials (module 9.2) this week. When completing the task this week:
consider the difficulties children might have learning from a touchscreen device. When thinking about this, also consider the ways in which technology could support a child's ability to learn, ad consider linking your ideas to the four pillars of learning. post about how technology has fostered your ability to learn as an adult. At the start of the teaching period you were asked to post about why you chose online study, p erhaps you could consider your experience as an online student when completing the task this week.
The following MCQs focus on Hirsh-Pasek et al. (2015) and the 4 Pillars of Learning in Educational
Applications (Apps).
1. Active Learning:
Children demonstrated more attention to e-book story when: (B)
a) their mother controlled the mouse.
b) they controlled the mouse.
c) no one has the chance to control the mouse.
- Engaging in the Learning Process:
According to the article, the three elements of app design that foster engagement are: (C)
a) Intrinsic motivation, contingent interactions, and social interactions.
b) Extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation, and social interactions.
c) Intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, and contingent interactions.
- Meaningful Learning:
What is the question that differentiate an app with meaningful learning? (A)
a) Does the app tap into the wider circle of a child’s life?
b) Does the app give instant reinforcement to the child?
c) Does the app involves social interaction?
- Social Interaction:
Children learn more, have higher level of arousal, and pay more attention when the avatar interacting
with them was controlled by (B)
a) the computer.
b) a real person.
c) a child of the same age.
