Developmentally-Appropriate Apps and eBooks: Where Are We?

Purpose: Despite using 11 commercial alphabet e-books for 16 sessions, 4-5 year-olds gained alphabetic knowledge no more than controls using storybooks (Willoughby, Evans, & Nowak, 2015). This presentation examines the e-books used and behaviours elicited to understand their inability to deliver the promotional promise of aiding alphabetic acquisition.
Method: In each of 2 sessions for 8 weeks, 4 of 11 e-books, rotating across weeks, were provided, each on a separate IPad, to 35 children in groups of 2-4 children. Behaviours in 7443 observations (averaging 213 per child) were examined across sessions by book (averaging 660 observations per book. Codes reflected e-book used, orientation (to book, researcher, other child, elsewhere), company (alone, with other child, other children), and activity (saying object name, letter name, letter sound; tapping letter hotspot, object hotspot, etc). Preferred books, preferred pages, and profiles of behaviour per book were identified and linked to book design.
Results highlights: Children were oriented to e-books on average 87% of the observations, and most often as alone (84%). Two e-books were each distinguished by greater orientation (95%) and less use alone (64%). Children also preferred these two, using them 38% of the session time, and tapping their object hotspots in 70% of these books’ observations. In all but one e-book, activating object hotspots far outweighed those for letters. In only 104 of the 7443 observations did children say letter sounds or names, this disproportionately occurring within certain e-books.
Conclusions: Educational and entertaining features may be antagonistic in commercial alphabet e-books.

Purpose –Young children increasingly engage with technology through eBooks and child-friendly apps that promote literacy, numeration, and self-regulation. An online formative e-assessment tool (CBDM) employs item banks of 6000+ validated words, numbers, algorithms, questions, and reading passages, by which teachers build short, reliable, individual e-assessments of literacy and numeracy to determine what preschoolers have/have not learned from instruction. Responses are immediately scored and interpreted; teachers receive automatic evidence-based skill-specific instructional strategies aligned with early learning standards. This study sought to determine if CBDM and its components impact children’s vocabulary acquisition.
Method - A two-group, classroom-level randomized control trial was employed to examine 204, 4-year-old children in 12 classrooms randomly drawn from 64 similar classrooms in a suburban/rural Head Start area. Six classes were randomly assigned to a treatment condition, six to “preK-as-usual.” All 12 used like curriculum, lesson plans and instructional materials.
Prior to a 12-wk. intervention, treatment teachers received three hours of training and three 1-hr. follow-up classroom visits. During Treatment teachers built and administered simple weekly vocabulary assessments and made one minor adjustment to instruction. Pre-post PPVT-IV (A&B) and GRTR were administered to all children.
Results –Repeated measures analysis indicated that groups were initially equivalent on both measures, but significantly different at post-test, p <.001, p <.002. Effect sizes were moderate (.38, .29).
Conclusions - Formative CBDM e-assessment is a simple yet valuable tool that provides immediate, valid, reliable data on students’ learning; and, when acted upon yields increased vocabulary and skills.

Purpose -Is literacy stimulated through popular educational apps and which elements of literacy in particular? To test whether there are cultural differences in the selection of popular apps we compared the same lists in three European countries differing in prosperity: Hungary, Turkey and the Netherlands.
Method: We coded the content of the 50 bestselling and 50 most popular free tablet apps in different categories including ‘Kids’, ‘Books’, ‘Educational games’, ‘Family games’ and ‘Word games’ in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store of the three countries.
Results highlight: Preliminary results show that only a small percentage of the apps supported early literacy and language development and learning. Many apps were story-like showing some character or event but without a story plot. Apps with complete stories were rather rare and often only available in English despite the fact that children in all three countries are not native speakers of English. There is a large overlap between the popular apps in the three countries. The majority of literacy-related apps teach technical literacy skills like letters or phonics but the level is mostly developmentally inappropriate.
Conclusions: The increasing amount of time spent with tablets may work to the detriment of young children’s emergent literacy skills as a result of the quality of apps children use. Parents seem to download and are even willing to pay for low-quality apps that are typically purely entertaining. Furthermore, we have serious concerns about the quality of the popular literacy-related apps.