This sparked a few questions. What about eBooks/ tech interface cause students with lower reading levels to be less successful using them? How does this relate to the “technology gap” as access to technology is similar in both low-income groups studied?

In “Putting Education in ‘Educational’ Apps: Lessons From the Science of Learning”, Hirsh-Pasek, Zosh, et. al describe the wide range of apps for children available today. It’s a refreshingly realistic view of the good and the bad, and more specifically, what differentiates the two. This is incredibly helpful for those of us interested in creating learning environments. Until this point, I had a lot of trouble making clear distinctions between what works and what does not.

The researchers highlight the importance of narrative in good apps. The enemy of narrative is distraction. As such, the educational games that work well keep the story moving, rather than offering all the bells and whistles, to reach better learning outcomes. Challenges that come seemingly out of nowhere tend to break concentration, rather than encouraging the child’s engagement. Just because you can create an interactive element, doesn’t mean that the game creators necessarily should.

I wonder if the power of narrative to encourage learning is related to the longterm success of programs that began on television (Sesame Street, Dora the Explorer) and then moved onto another platform. Children are already familiar with the narrative, without having to be necessarily reminded within the app, creating more opportunities to move into areas where children get to make choices through gameplay, without losing the narrative’s momentum.

“Bonawitz and Schultz presented 4-year-olds with a toy that had four hidden functions. In one condition, children were told what the toy could do, shown one of its functions, and then left to explore the toy. In the other condition, an experimenter accidentally “tripped” on one of the functions (the same function demonstrated in the other condition) before the children were left to explore the toy. Children in the exploration condition were much more likely to discover all of the toy’s remaining functions, whereas those in the directed condition seemed restricted to the function that had been shown to them.”

I was initially sparked by how social interactions prior to their evaluation in this experiment may have shaped their responses to the activity, especially given the early learning mechanisms developed during infancy. The original article does address that it is entirely possible that “by the time children reach preschool, they have learned that pedagogical contexts apply beyond situations with ostensive cueing…By preschool, children seem actively to evaluate their teachers both for the knowledge they have and their ability to demonstrate it. Thus, well before children are immersed in formal education, they are sensitive to some conditions that promote effective instruction.”

I found this particularly interesting because I personally found that people often discount the capacity very young children have for processing complex information, especially in cultures who lack the educational foundation to understand childhood development, and that the platform on which they will learn formal education begins much earlier than the classroom.

If the industry is profiting from capitalizing on children’s non-educational interests, what incentives do they have for pursuing these recommendations?

Personally, I really appreciated that each example was grounded in evidence from the Science of Learning and the parallels that were made to describe how researchers have evaluated it for television in the past. I hope to be able to apply their framework when I do my technology review assignment and as I look for edtech jobs after school.