Full length articleEmotions, private speech, involvement and other aspects of young children's interactions with educational apps
Introduction
Nowadays in many societies, children are exposed to connected digital devices from birth (Chaudron et al., 2015), and by between eighteen months and five years old they have already integrated mobile devices into their environments (Fidler, 2014; EU Kids Online, 2014; Mascheroni & Kjartan, 2014; Vincent, 2015). Indeed, the introduction and widespread use of tablets has led to apps on mobile devices being increasingly used from early childhood, as noted by several authors (Chaudron et al., 2015; Zosh, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, & Parish-Morris, 2016, pp. 1–5). According to the report ‘Common Sense Media’, in USA 38% of children under two years of age use mobile devices regularly (Rideout, Saphir, Pai, Rudd, & Pritchett, 2013) and 27% of children between two- and four-years old use them for almost 1.5 h on a daily basis (Rideout, 2017). The data provided by Mascheroni and Kjartan (2014) and the EU's ‘Kids Online’ Report (2014) point to a similar situation in Europe. Spain's National Statistics Institute (INE, 2019) highlights an increase in the presence of digital devices in homes: 98.5% of homes have at least a smartphone, and 56.8% also have a tablet. Similarly, the OFCom European report (2019) shows that children between three and four years old use a tablet to play games (39%), to watch video-on-demand (36%) and to go online (49%). This is because the touch screen simplifies the interaction between the child and the device compared to using a computer and a mouse, as predicted by Strommen in 1993 and as subsequently confirmed by empirical studies (Blumberg & Fisch, 2013).
With this pattern of use in mind, the relevance of this project lies in supporting examination of the touch-screen app as a possible educational environment in itself.
According to Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory (1979), children's relationships with their immediate social environments (microsystem) influence their development, and these relationships include all the activities and interactions the child carries out. As interaction with technology is usually part of a child's microsystem, the ecological techno-subsystem was proposed and added to Bronfenbrenner's model (Johnson & Puplampu, 2008).
Parents recognize the educational value of digital games, and most of them (80%) allow download apps for their kids (Rideout, 2017). Educators agree with the international scientific community that a responsible use of mobile devices can be highly beneficial for the early learning experience (Blumberg & Fisch, 2013; Connolly, Boyle, MacAuthor, Hainey, & Boyle, 2012; Granic, Lobel, & Engels, 2014). Children between eighteen and sixty months old can interact with interactive screens (Oliemat, Ihmeideh, & Alkhawaldeh, 2018; Soliman & Nathan-Roberts, 2018), learn from them (Blumberg & Fisch, 2013; Herodotou, 2018; Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015) and transfer their learning to the offline world (Schroeder & Kirkorian, 2016). Nevertheless, learning from technology depends on the nature and quality of the interactive content (Blumberg & Fisch, 2013; Huber et al., 2016). In contrast to passive exposure to other screens (television), the hypothesis of the study is that interactions with educational apps by very young children produce observable forms of behaviour, that could guide the development of high-quality digital educational tools.
There is also agreement in the literature that the potential for young children to acquire meaningful learning by playing with educational apps can be maximized if it is accompanied and mediated by caregivers (educators, parents, etc.). However, among parents of children up to eight years old, 37% say that they never or almost never co-use apps on mobile devices with their children; in other words, their children are left to play with mobile devices independently (Chaudron et al., 2015; Rideout, 2017), confirming a tendency noted by Nielsen Group (2012) and Takeuchi (2011). That said, according to a survey of 704 parents of children aged three to four in the UK (OFCom. Office of Communications, 2019), children are often (24%) the owners of the tablet they play on. Given the relevance of these habits of use, the study focuses on children's individual and spontaneous interactions with educational apps.
The research objective is to provide a description of children's behaviour (emotions, verbal production, involvement, understandings, achievements and game times) during their spontaneous interactions with educational applications for tablets, thus contributing to the evaluation and development of digital educational tools.
Emotions play an important role in communication and social interactions from birth, and facial expressions are good behavioural indicators of emotion (Preuschoft, 2000). There is agreement in the literature that emotions are also a factor that guides behaviour and that has an effect on motivation (Op't Eynde & Hannula, 2006; Leutner, 2014), as well as on some cognitive strategies (e.g. information acquisition and storing). Emotions have an effect on information processing, according to the “control value theory of achievement emotions” (Pekrun, 2006). The emotions “joy” or “happiness” could be related to the prospect of success and anger over the experience of failure (Sharma, Papavlasopoulou and Giannokos, 2019, pp. 133–145). Positive emotions experienced during an agreeable task produce an intrinsic motivation that has a favourable effect on learning, even with multimedia (Plass, Heidig, Hayward, Homer, & Um, 2013). This in turn generates further positive emotions. Bacete and Betoret indicate that the effect of negative emotions on the learning process depends on the context of the tasks, as well as the “existence of an optimal distance between what the pupil already knows and the new learning content” (Bacete & Betoret, 1997, p. 13).
The second aspect considered in the interaction is the child's verbal production, which determines the “socially interactive” learning of an educational app (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015) and therefore the app's capacity to generate face-to-face interactions around the screen.
In an analysis of empirical studies, McCarrick and Li (2007) found that the use of computers by children under five years old to play or to carry out a task generates a wide variety of positive social interactions. This has been observed not only with parents (Clements, 2003), but also with educators (Heft & Swaminathan, 2002; Shahrimin & Butterworth, 2001). Other studies suggest that, in a context in which two children of pre-school age play together on a shared computer, the frequency of verbal production is comparable to other contexts of play (Kelly & Schorger, 2001; Verenikina, Kervin, Rivera, & Lidbetter, 2016).
This study also proposes to consider the private speech generated while playing with apps because of its importance in guiding and regulating children's behaviour in the learning process (Day, Smith, Neal, & Dunsmore, 2018). Private speech was first observed by Piaget (1926) and is defined as language directed to oneself that guides cognitive execution and regulates social behaviour (Zivin, 1979). According to Vygotsky (1978), it is an instrument of early thought and development that disappears at around seven to eight years old. More recent literature draws attention to the multiple functions of private speech, particularly in the child's self-regulation of emotion (for example, during frustrating tasks), and in the execution of problem-solving tasks more than in free-play situations (Alarcón-Rubio, Sánchez and Prieto, 2014; Aro, Poikkeus, Laakso, Tolvanen, & Ahonen, 2015). Both speech with the researcher and private speech, therefore, are considered aspects of how young children interact with educational apps.
An additional component of this construct is the time the child spends playing with educational apps and its degree of involvement in what it is doing. The literature suggests that high levels of immersion (Cheng, She, & Annetta, 2015) and engagement in a game (Martinovic, Burgess, Pomerleau, & Marin, 2016) result in improved game performance and learning. The word “engagement” is problematic because there is a lack of agreement on what the concept means, and several authors (Martinovic et al., 2016; Ronimus, Kujala, Tolvanen, & Lyytinen, 2014) operationalize it through dissimilar variables (e.g. game duration, understanding and emotions). By contrast, the term “involvement” encompasses a set of variables such as attention, effort, persistence and immersion in the game, which are problematic to study separately through observation, but which suggest the behaviour to be “involved with or participating in something”, as will be detailed in section 2.3.
Finally, given the importance of understanding the objective of the app and of achieving play as the prerequisites of a potential learning process, the study considers game understanding and achievement in order to evaluate children's access to and use of digital interactive content. As the features of app design directly influence both aspects, in the study observation focused on the aspect of the game that gave a child difficulties in understanding the objective of the game or how to achieve that objective.
Therefore, the research raises two research questions. The first research question (RQ1) is: What emotions, verbal production, involvement, understandings, achievements and game times do four-year-old children show while interacting with educational apps?
As hypothesized in a previous study [hidden], some features of educational apps could limit, or support, children's interaction with digital educational contents, leading to the second research question (RQ2): Which features of app design facilitate child interaction, and which are an obstacle to it?
Section snippets
Materials and methods
The study used a non-invasive procedure based on a mixed exploratory design and a multimodal method. The structured observational data were complemented with qualitative fieldnotes.
Children's emotions, involvement and speech
The statistical descriptions of the children's interactions are complemented by qualitative data from fieldnotes. Qualitative field data have been reported highlighting the most significant findings and following the principle of saturation. For each app, mean and standard deviations of the variables observed were calculated (see Appendix B). The surprise the apps generated in the sample of children was limited (mean 1.6; SD 2), while enthusiasm (mean 2.9; SD 2.4) was the emotion most often
Discussion and conclusion
The operational definition of children's interactions with educational apps reveals a reliable construct composed of three dimensions (access, active engagement and social speech) that correspond only partially to the four pillars theorized by Hirsh-Pasek et al. (2015). In accordance with these authors' findings and the results of this study, the app's content and design had to help participants stay on the task (2nd pillar and “active engagement” dimension). Hirsh-Pasek and colleagues also
Funding sources
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Lucrezia Crescenzi-Lanna: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Visualization, Investigation, Validation, Writing - review & editing.
Acknowledgements
This work was developed in the framework of the Programa de Pós-graduação em Educação at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil (ref. 23080. 053175/2016-48); I wish to thank Tainá Vital Ravelles for her assistance with data collection, the professor Margareth C., as well as the children and families who took part in the study.
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