Memorizing plans with an app: A case for personalized technology that stimulates cognitive engagement

Abstract

Planning is an important but difficult self-regulation strategy. The successful implementation of a plan requires that the plan is retrievable in everyday life when it is needed. Children in particular are unlikely to use effective strategies to internalize plans in a way that makes them easy to remember. Therefore, we designed PROMPT, a planning app to help children create and internalize plans effectively. The app included different internalization activities that were hypothesized to promote deeper or shallower processing of plans. School-aged children (N = 106, 9-14 years) used PROMPT for 27 days in their daily lives. Contrary to our hypotheses, the type of internalization activity was not associated with memory success overall. Deeper processing activities were only effective for children who spent more time performing these activities, suggesting that there were differences in how effectively children could make use of the internalization activities. These individual differences were predicted by children’s grade level and their analogical reasoning abilities, and mediated by time on task. Findings suggest that a child-appropriate planning app needs to be personalized to be effective; internalization activities have to be tailored to children’s learning prerequisites.

Fostering children's acceptance of educational apps: The importance of designing enjoyable learning activities

“…Moreover, we assumed that learning activities which children have a more positive affect towards would be more predictive of their perceived enjoyment of the educational app. Note that this is different from Biedermann et al (2023) because attitude is defined differently (ie, composite score of perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness) in the current study following the proposition of the Technology Acceptance Model (Davis et al, 1989).…”

“…With the exception of one child who was assessed in person, all sessions were carried out remotely via webcam that was pointed at their smartphone screens. Further details on participants' socio-demographic information and the usability of the app can be found in Biedermann et al (2023).…”

“…Note that, because of the current paper's focus on condition differences in attitude, as well as, behavioural intention for continued usage, both the nature of the sentences (ie, them being plans) and learning success are largely irrelevant. These aspects form part of a different paper (Biedermann et al, 2023). Plans were presented within the app with one of three internalization activities: emoji, puzzle, or reading (see Figure 2).…”

“…That is, children who completed the study reported their attitude nine times (three times per activity) throughout the study. Different to a previous study (Biedermann et al, 2023), here we only considered the two items which are proposed in the Technology Acceptance Model as contributors to attitude (Davis, 1989). Hence, the items captured children's perceived usefulness ('Were you able to remember the plans better with this activity'?…”

“…Children were presented with one of three activities (emoji, puzzle or reading) to learn one plan per day (Figure 3). The same activity was used for three consecutive days, after which a different activity was performed for 3 days and so on (see Biedermann et al, 2023). Thus, children who completed the study learned 27 plans over the course of the study (within-subject design).…”