Learning with educational apps: A qualitative study of the most popular free apps in Norway

Kolås, Line; Nordseth, Hugo; Munkvold, Robin

doi:10.1109/ithet.2016.7760701

Cited by 10 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…Research has shown that the majority of educational apps are presented in the form of a game or a multiple choice quiz, in a closed-ended format, specially designed for simple math or literacy purposes or drawing, supporting only input from a single-finger touch, without conceptualizing the affordances of the new technological interfaces (Baccaglini-Frank and Maracci, 2015). Other apps focus on the “fun” experience so that the emphasis on the specific educational content is too weak (Kolâs et al , 2016). Several reviews of educational apps for young-age children have also found that most of them simply follow outdated models in the form of skill and drill practices and flashcards (Callaghan and Reich, 2018).…”

Section: Review Of Literature On App Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tools for evaluating educational apps for young children: a systematic review of the literature

Papadakis

2020

ITSE

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Purpose This study, by critically analyzing material from multiple sources, aims to provide an overview of what is available on evaluation tools for educational apps for children. To realize this objective, a systematic literature review was conducted to search all English literature published after January 2010 in multiple electronic databases and internet sources. Various combinations of search strings were used due to database construction differences, while the results were cross-referenced to discard repeated references, obtaining those that met the criteria for inclusion. Design/methodology/approach The present study was conducted according to the methods provided by Khan et al. (2003) and Thomé et al. (2016). The whole procedure included four stages: planning the review, identifying relevant studies in the literature, critical analysis of the literature, summarizing and interpreting the findings (Figure 1). Furthermore, in this analysis, a well-known checklist, PRISMA, was also used as a recommendation (Moher et al., 2015). Findings These review results reveal that, although there are several evaluation tools, in their majority they are not considered adequate to help teachers and parents to evaluate the pedagogical affordances of educational apps correctly and easily. Indeed, most of these tools are considered outdated. With the emergence of new issues such as General Data Protection Regulation, the quality criteria and methods for assessing children's products need to be continuously updated and adapted (Stoyanov et al., 2015). Some of these tools might be considered as good beginnings, but their “limited dimensions make generalizable considerations about the worth of apps” (Cherner, Dix and Lee, 2014, p. 179). Thus, there is a strong need for effective evaluation tools to help parents and teachers when choosing educational apps (Callaghan and Reich, 2018). Research limitations/implications Even though this work is performed by following the systematic mapping guideline, threats to the validity of the results presented still exist. Although custom strings that contained a rich collection of data were used to search for papers, potentially relevant publications that would have been missed by the advanced search might exist. It is recommended that at least two different reviewers should independently review titles, abstracts and later full papers for exclusion (Thomé et al., 2016). In this study, only one reviewer – the author – selected the papers and did the review. In the case of a single researcher, Kitchenham (2004) recommends that the single reviewer should consider discussing included and excluded papers with an expert panel. The researcher, following this recommendation, discussed the inclusion and exclusion procedure with an expert panel of two professionals with research experience from the Department of (removed for blind review). To deal with publication bias, the researcher in conjunction with the expert panel used the search strategies identified by Kitchenham (2004) including: Grey literature, conference proceedings, communicating with experts working in the field for any unpublished literature. Practical implications The purpose of this study was not to advocate any evaluation tool. Instead, the study aims to make parents, educators and software developers aware of the various evaluation tools available and to focus on their strengths, weaknesses and credibility. This study also highlights the need for a standardized app evaluation (Green et al., 2014) via reliable tools, which will allow anyone interested to evaluate apps with relative ease (Lubniewski et al., 2018). Parents and educators need a reliable, fast and easy-to-use tool for the evaluation of educational apps that is more than a general guideline (Lee and Kim, 2015). A new generation of evaluation tools would also be used as a reference among the software developers, designers to create educational apps with real educational value. Social implications The results of this study point to the necessity of creating new evaluation tools based on research, either in the form of rubrics or checklists to help educators and parents to choose apps with real educational value. Originality/value However, to date, no systematic review has been published summarizing the available app evaluation tools. This study, by critically analyzing material from multiple sources, aims to provide an overview of what is available on evaluation tools for educational apps for children.

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Section: Review Of Literature On App Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tools for evaluating educational apps for young children: a systematic review of the literature

Papadakis

2020

ITSE

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“…They are training children in automating tasks such as addition and subtraction through ongoing practice and repetition. Such apps are amongst the most popular and top rated in the app market [3], [16]. It is thus worthwhile to examine whether these widely used and positively perceived apps are beneficial for children and their learning.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Experimental Investigation of ‘Drill-and-Practice’ Mobile Apps and Young Children

Herodotou

Mangafa

Srisontisuk

2022

Int. J. Interact. Mob. Technol.

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The choice of mobile applications (apps) for learning has been heavily relied on customer and teacher reviews, designers’ descriptions, and alignment with existing learning and human-computer interaction theories. There is limited empirical evidence to advise on the educational value of mobile apps as these are used by children. Understanding the impact of mobile apps on young children’s learning is timely given the lack of evidence-based recommendations that could guide parents and teachers in selecting apps for their children. In this paper, we present the results of a series of randomised control trial (RCTs) with 376 children aged 5 to 6 years old who interacted with two maths apps in three schools in the UK. Pre/post-test comparisons revealed learning gains in both the control and intervention groups, suggesting that the selected applications are equally good to standard maths practice. Implications for the selection and use of mobile apps are discussed.

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“…The app under study could be described as instructive [18]; it is mostly a drill and practice app, with game-like external rewards. Its design reflects the design of the great majority of learning apps available in the market (see also [21]). The strengths of this type of learning design is the potential to provide immediate feedback and automate simple skills such as addition of small sums through repetition (ibid).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

MAD Learn: An Evidence-based Affordance Framework to Assessing Learning Apps

Herodotou

2021

2021 7th International Conference of the Immersive Learning Research Network (iLRN)

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Existing recommendations about how to select or design mobile applications (apps) for learning have been heavily relied on customer and teacher reviews, designer descriptions, and educational theories. There is a lack of evaluation frameworks that are informed by research evidence of how different children interact and use apps. The first version of an evidence-based framework, coined as MAD learn, is presented detailing affordances that hinder or help children's learning, as emerged from relevant studies. To encourage further studies in the field, not only by researchers but also designers and practitioners, a methodological approach to iteratively assess the affordances of mobile apps is also introduced. This is based on (a) visualising the learning design and learning components of a given app and (b) analysing the screen and audio recordings of children's interactions with apps. The proposed approach has been tested with 17 children 5-6 years old who interacted with a maths app. The analysis captured patterns of actual usage, including time spent on different activities, completion rates, communication instances, and number and type of mistakes. Insights revealed that certain design affordances, including instructions, feedback, and help-on-demand, were differently perceived by children, in some cases helping learning while, in others, hindering it. Index terms-mobile apps, maths learning, children, evidence-based framework, evaluationThis work has been funded by the British Academy Mid-Career fellowship scheme (MD170009).

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Learning with educational apps: A qualitative study of the most popular free apps in Norway

Cited by 10 publications

References 1 publication

Tools for evaluating educational apps for young children: a systematic review of the literature

Tools for evaluating educational apps for young children: a systematic review of the literature

An Experimental Investigation of ‘Drill-and-Practice’ Mobile Apps and Young Children

MAD Learn: An Evidence-based Affordance Framework to Assessing Learning Apps

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