What is Interactive Media?

For many parents, interactive media in childhood is uncharted territory that we didn’t personally experience growing up. Interactive media primarily refers to touchscreen applications (apps) on mobile devices (tablets and smartphones), which became mainstream in 2011 with the introduction of the iPad. In recent years, interactive media has become increasingly prevalent in children’s lives. Importantly, a recent report found that 97% of American homes across income levels have a mobile device and 48% of children under the age of eight even have their own mobile device! While mobile devices can of course be used for both receptive (such as watching videos) and interactive media (apps), this post will primarily focus on the use of mobile media for apps. There are a countless number of apps marketed toward young children for education and entertainment. But are young children actually able to use touchscreens, and are apps beneficial for learning?

Can Young Children Use Touchscreens?

There is often an assumption that touchscreens are intuitive for young children because they grow up surrounded by them. It’s true that children gravitate toward devices like smartphones, but that may be due to the value they see parents place on these devices. Research suggests that children ages two and younger are somewhat able to perform basic touchscreen gestures like tap, flick, swipe, pinch, and zoom. It is unclear whether this is truly something that comes naturally to children or whether they learn it through observing their parents use interactive media.

Children’s touchscreen skills do improve as they get older and gain both more experience with devices and improved fine motor skills. In fact, Dr. Liz’s master’s thesis research found that in a study of 100 preschool-aged children, three-year-olds were able to accurately perform 60% of the common touchscreen gestures required by educational apps (e.g., tap, double tap, swipe, drag & drop), while four-year-olds performed 75% of the gestures and five-year-olds performed 91% of the gestures, on average. These varied age differences in touchscreen abilities are an important consideration for parents when choosing apps for young children, especially apps that target learning.

Are Apps Beneficial for Learning?

The content and design of an educational app primarily drive what a child learns. While receptive media requires children to devote cognitive resources to process both narrative content and educational content in order to learn, interactive media adds the additional cognitive demand of understanding the gestures required to use the touchscreen. The same cognitive resources are used for processing all three aspects of the app (narrative content, educational content, and touchscreen gestures). The design of an app and how well the narrative content, educational content, and gameplay features are integrated are an important factor in how successfully a child can learn an educational lesson from interactive media. 

There are a number of potential benefits for learning that are unique to interactive media. One major benefit is that many educational apps are customizable. Game content can be customized to engage players in a deeper learning experience based on personal motivation. From the topic of the game to the color of the character’s shirt, children have a wide variety of choices when using interactive media. Furthermore, apps on mobile media devices offer the benefit of contingency, which means the screen directly responds to the actions of the child. This can help some children to better understand and apply information learned on the screen in the real world. 

Unfortunately, research about the effectiveness of apps to teach educational content is limited compared to the vast popularity of educational apps. Across the existing, high-quality studies of learning from interactive media, findings suggest that young children do benefit from app play and show the greatest learning gains from educational apps when the app is designed to teach science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) knowledge. Apps may be uniquely suited to teach science skills due to the fact that STEM concepts are best comprehended when learned through physical experience, which is more easily replicated through interactive media than receptive media. 

How to Choose and Use High-Quality Apps for Young Children

There are thousands of apps advertised for children, with many touting educational outcomes. However, there currently are no universal standards for how educational content in apps is categorized and advertised. That means apps can make claims about the content they “teach” without actually having any proof to back up the claim. Research suggests that children are ready to learn when the content and the way it is taught are both developmentally appropriate. However, it is simply not feasible for researchers to evaluate the educational potential of every available app. This means that it is up to you to vet and choose apps that actually benefit your child and meet your goals. 

As a parent, there are steps you can take to help your child gain confidence and competence with the touchscreen and guide them toward successful interactive learning.  It is necessary to evaluate not only the advertised age that the app targets but also the skills required by an app and your own child’s abilities to ensure they are a match. The first step is ensuring that your child is capable of performing the necessary gestures to achieve their on-screen goals. One way to test their skills is to open the photos app on your phone or tablet and show your child basic skills like tap, double tap, swipe, drag, flick, pinch, and zoom. Then help them practice to strengthen their skills and successfully navigate the interactive touchscreen. The second step, if your goal is learning from apps, is to carefully choose high-quality content.

Research from the science of learning suggests that when choosing apps, content should be considered using the E-AIMS model—apps should have a supported learning goal and be engaging (not unnecessarily distracting), actively involved (minds-on), meaningful (applicable to children’s daily lives), and social (encouraging interaction with social partners) to support a fun and challenging learning experience for young children. We’ll break this down further and give you some specific take-home tips for choosing high-quality media.

When choosing interactive media, think E-AIMS.

• Engaging: While a common trend in children’s apps is to include many bells and whistles to provide an exciting and flashy app, less is more when it comes to teaching educational content. When extraneous material and distractions are limited, children are able to engage in deeper learning. Apps should define a particular learning goal and carefully include only information pertinent to the goal to reduce cognitive load. Interactive media is best suited to help learners recognize and remember specific associations, which suggests that the most successful educational apps will focus on teaching children specific content in an exciting way to boost both their knowledge of and interest in the content. Furthermore, due to the challenge of transferring information from 2D to 3D contexts, a successful learning app should utilize multiple repetition of the target content. To accomplish this, the app should introduce and reinforce the target educational content in varied ways to aid children in forming flexible mental representations of the content that can lead to greater ease of far transfer. Cognitive load can also be reduced by ensuring that tasks within the app are age-appropriate or adjustable based on a child’s abilities. 
• Actively Involved: Research has shown that children make the greatest learning gains when the task they are performing requires slightly more than they can accomplish on their own. This approach recommends pushing children out of their comfort zone in small, incremental ways. To apply this finding to an app, there should be multiple levels that match children’s developmental level. The target educational content should be carefully integrated with the features of gameplay and, as often as possible, gameplay features should require children to utilize the target educational content to accomplish goals.
• Meaningful: To learn and transfer information from screens, apps must require children to move beyond rote memorization to develop a larger framework for the facts imparted through interactive technology. For this learning to occur, children must be able to connect the content to their existing knowledge and experience and to incorporate the information into a mental model. Apps can accomplish this by drawing meaningful connections between children’s actual lives and the on-screen context through features like requiring children to take pictures of objects in their environment. Furthermore, by incorporating familiar settings in which novel information is presented in the app like testing the weight of balls at a park, measuring liquids in a kitchen, or comparing sizes of books in a library, apps can help children focus on the new educational information. 
• Social: While educational apps are often designed for solo use by a child, there are still opportunities for creating engaging social interactions. High-quality apps for learning should ideally provide opportunities for the child to interact with others in their environment, which can mean including options like multi-player games or parent content guides. Another way this can be accomplished, which may be particularly beneficial for children without an adult who is actively engaged in their media use, is through familiarity with app characters. When children see the same character repeatedly through an app, children may be able to develop an emotional bond that helps them learn. Alternatively, apps can utilize popular TV characters to impart new content, as children will already have a meaningful connection with their favorite characters and therefore be more likely to learn.