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Because of the continuous stream of touchscreen apps that are claimed to be educational and the increasing use of touchscreen devices in early childhood, considerable attention is being paid to the effect of touchscreens on young children's learning. However, the existing empirical findings in young child samples are not consistent. In this meta-analysis, we tested the overall effect of touchscreen devices on young children's (0- to 5-year-olds) learning performance, as well as moderators of this effect, based on 36 empirical articles (79 effect sizes) involving 4,206 participants. The overall analysis showed a significant touchscreen learning effect (d = 0.46), indicating that young children indeed benefited from touchscreen learning. Interestingly, age, learning material domain, comparison group, and experimental environment significantly moderated the effect of touchscreen devices on young children's learning outcomes. These findings shed light on the role of touchscreen-related physical experience in early childhood education.
Introduction
Since Apple launched the iPad in 2010, the whole world has begun to be obsessed with a new kind of technical product–touchscreen devices. The popularization of touchscreen devices has stoked public interest in its potential for early childhood education (Rideout, 2014; Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015; Apple, 2017). By March 2018, Apple reports that there have been over 180,000 educational applications (“apps”) designed specifically for education (Apple, 2018a). In a 2017 nationwide survey by Common Sense Media in the U.S., 98% of children from birth to 8 live in a home with mobile devices, 95% of families with children this age have a smartphone, 78% have a tablet, and 42% of children have their own tablet device; 71% of parents report that they have downloaded apps (including educational apps) for their children to use; 67% of parents whose children use screen media say it helps their child's learning, and 80% of them at least somewhat agree that they are satisfied with the amount and quality of educational screen media available for their children (Rideout, 2017). In addition, touchscreen devices have been gaining wide acceptance in school settings, which has been a global phenomenon (Beach and Castek, 2015; Haßler et al., 2015; McLean, 2016; Chou et al., 2017). For example, with the rapid growth of mobile touchscreen technologies, BYOD (bring your own device) has become a feasible pedagogical strategy aimed at promoting students' active engagement during learning (Nortcliffe and Middleton, 2013). BYOD allows students (including young children) to bring their touchscreens or other devices into classrooms for learning goals (Nelson, 2012; New Media Consortium, 2015; Chou et al., 2017). Research showed that 43% of pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade students use mobile devices (e.g., touchscreens) for classroom activities, and they have been adopted as an innovative approach to support traditional learning and teaching practices (New Media Consortium, 2015). This means many children and teachers are authorized to learn and teach by touching the screens, which is more or less different from traditional non-technology-enhanced classroom settings. To some degree, thus, the prevalent enthusiasm for the application of touchscreen devices to early childhood education is literally playing its role in the process that young students learn as well as teachers teach (Hu and Garimella, 2014; New Media Consortium, 2015; Apple, 2017; Papadakis et al., 2017; Chambers et al., 2018).
Touchscreen-based app developers believe that their apps are able to promote young children's learning performance (Riconscente, 2013; Schroeder and Kirkorian, 2016; Apple, 2017; Herodotou, 2018b). It says on Apple's official website (Apple, 2018b) that iPad apps can help children “stay focused,” “ignite the creativity in every student,” and “bring their biggest ideas to life;” the power and flexibility of iPad can “transform how students learn about and connect with the world around them…make a history lesson as vivid as the present by restoring ancient artifacts, or even peer inside everyday objects to understand how they're put together.” With tools developed for teaching, iPad apps can make it easy for teachers to gain “valuable insight into each student's progress,” “focus on what's most important—teaching,” and even help teachers “evaluate students' long-term progress as they move toward statewide testing.” After highlighting the worldwide amazing success of iPad usage in education, Apple (2017) summarized that using iPad might have the following advantages: (1) improvement in academic performance; (2) increase in engagement and motivation; (3) rise in cost savings and resource efficiency; and (4) integrated focus on content quality and design. From those mentioned above, it seems that touchscreen apps have the potential to make learning and teaching more powerful, which is seemingly beneficial to the improvement of children's learning performance (Wang et al., 2016).
However, the effects of these so-called “educational” apps on learning outcomes remain largely untested, especially during the early years after the introduction of the iPad (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015). Only in recent years has this question been extensively and seriously concerned by scholars. The related empirical work has been published in journals such as Science (e.g., Berkowitz et al., 2015), Psychological Science (e.g., Choi and Kirkorian, 2016), Child Development (e.g., Zimmermann et al., 2017), Frontiers in Psychology (e.g., Tarasuik et al., 2018), Computers and Education (e.g., Walczak and Taylor, 2018), Computers in Human Behavior (e.g., Huber et al., 2016), etc. For the same purpose in previous work, the present study focused on reevaluating the impact of educational touchscreen devices on young children's learning outcomes (i.e., whether learning by touching a screen could facilitate young children's learning outcome) by conducting a meta-analysis.
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Objective and Rationale
Consider a learning scenario in which a child plays an educational game on a hand-held device such as an iPad. The touchscreen interface of an iPad affords the possibility of physical interactivity such as touching an object on the screen with a finger by a continuous dragging manipulation or by a discrete tapping manipulation (Dubé and McEwen, 2015). The objective of this meta-analysis is to assess the potential pedagogic value of the physical interactivity features of touchscreen devices.
The rationale of this meta-analysis is that an assessment of the overall influence of using touchscreen devices on young children's learning outcomes is required before widely introducing touchscreen devices to their learning at home or in preschool. In just a few short years, dozens of studies have been conducted to verify the effect of touchscreen devices with physical interactivity features on young children's learning performance (e.g., Aladé et al., 2016; Huber et al., 2016; Kirkorian et al., 2016; Patchan and Puranik, 2016; Schroeder and Kirkorian, 2016). However, the mixed findings (i.e., some studies find positive effects of touchscreen on learning performance, but others find no or even negative effects, see section Research on Young Children's Touchscreen Learning) in this body of research call into question the robustness of this effect. Thus, it is worthwhile to determine whether touchscreen device usage can work to improve child learning.
Research on Young Children's Touchscreen Learning
Viewing from a lifespan perspective of cognition, children's knowledge acquisition is likely to be based on their physical experience (Kontra et al., 2012; Loeffler et al., 2016; Setti and Borghi, 2018). This is to some extent in line with the viewpoint of early developmental psychologists (Piaget, 1952; Held and Hein, 1963). In the field of developmental and cognitive science, the notion that physical action and cognition are linked is actually not a novel concept (Glenberg et al., 2013). For instance, Piaget (1952) proposed that knowledge acquired by children is constructed through their actions and it is these body actions that subserve the creation of mental representations which are of importance to information processing. According to his theory, young children, even infants, construct a comprehension of the physical world through their actions and engagement with the world. A body of subsequent research in young child samples confirmed the crucial impact of such physical experience on cognitive processes (e.g., Adolph and Avolio, 2000; Thelen et al., 2001; Smith, 2005; Hadzigeorgiou et al., 2009; Boncoddo et al., 2010; Becker et al., 2014; Mavilidi et al., 2015; Toumpaniari et al., 2015). Besides, effective learning occurs not only when children physically manipulate the materials (Glenberg et al., 2007), but also when they manipulate them in the form of imagination, as long as they possess enough imagining basis in some way, for example, by teaching children how to imagine during learning (Glenberg et al., 2004; Glenberg, 2011).
Because actions play a vital role in the process of young children's cognitive development (Piaget, 1952), it should be beneficial if a certain (virtual) environment is created to strengthen the link between young children's physical experience and their cognitive processing. Touchscreen devices provide a unique and virtual testbed for the effect of physical manipulation on children's learning (Baccaglini-Frank and Maracci, 2015; Wang et al., 2016). Extending the above idea of learning via physical experience and/or actions, scholars have strongly advocated that learning tools in an educational context should be designed in an embodied way (Abrahamson, 2014, 2015; Abrahamson and Lindgren, 2014). A touchscreen device is one of those embodiment-based tools providing access to learning through physical interaction because it invites a child to physically manipulate the elements (e.g., with a finger) presented on the screen. For example, with the help of an iPad a child can scrutinize an object through rotating or zooming it. These sensorimotor interactions and bodily engagement with the touchscreen learning environment contribute to the construction of children's mental representations as well as their cognitive processes (Wang et al., 2016; Yuill and Martin, 2016; Duijzer et al., 2017). Thus, learning from touchscreens is supposed to be potentially beneficial to student performance (Wang et al., 2016).
A series of empirical research has been conducted to examine whether touchscreen learning leads to a stable improvement of young children's learning outcomes; however, this outcome has not yet received consistent support (e.g., Huber et al., 2016; Schroeder and Kirkorian, 2016; Wang et al., 2016; Furman et al., 2018), with some studies showing that touchscreen facilitates their learning performance, but others showing that touchscreen does not or even hinders learning performance (see below for details).
On the one hand, some studies have found that there was some beneficial effect of touchscreen devices on young children's learning achievement (McKenna, 2012; Schacter and Jo, 2016; Wang et al., 2016; Papadakis et al., 2018). For example, a pre- and post-test study conducted by Wang et al. (2016) found that after 10 min of exposure to an iPad touchscreen app designed to teach how to tell time, the post-test scores of 5- to 6-year-old children were significantly higher than those at pre-test, supporting their prediction that children could benefit from the touchscreen itself. This positive role of touchscreen-based learning in learning outcomes has also been proved in a limited number of studies of younger children (e.g., Patchan and Puranik, 2016) and even toddlers (e.g., Strouse and Ganea, 2017). On the other hand, the educational effect of touchscreens on young children's learning outcomes has been questioned in some other studies (e.g., Schroeder and Kirkorian, 2016; Piotrowski and Krcmar, 2017; Zipke, 2017). Quite a few studies indicated that learning from touchscreens did not show superiority over other learning methods, for example, learning with physical objects (Huber et al., 2016), learning by watching on touchscreens (Aladé et al., 2016), or face-to-face paper teaching (Kwok et al., 2016). For instance, Aladé et al. (2016) asked preschool-aged children from 45 to 68 months to play an animal measuring game. Results on transfer performance indicated that participants who played the game by touching a tablet did not outperform their counterparts who viewed a video-recorded version of the game that was otherwise identical in content to the interactive game. In addition, several studies even discovered a negative impact of touchscreen learning on child performance (e.g., Parish-Morris et al., 2013). Simply put, the mixed findings bring into question the robustness of touchscreen effect with respect to young children's learning. Fortunately, this question could be addressed through meta-analysis to synthesize and test the data from multiple empirical studies.
The above mixed findings at least indicate that not in all cases touchscreen technology has a positive effect on cognitive processing (Wang et al., 2016, p2). Part of the reason might be that there are some potential moderators of this effect. However, to our knowledge, there has been no call for a search for potential moderators in touchscreen learning research and touchscreen scholars have been primarily concerned with the question of whether touchscreen learning works, thus leading to no sufficient knowledge about when it works. To date, dozens of studies have been conducted to verify the touchscreen learning effect in samples of young children under 6 years old (see Table), with different characteristics of participants (e.g., age), learning materials (e.g., learning material domain), and experimental designs (e.g., comparison condition, test media, experimental environment). These sets of characteristics are usually regarded as important potential moderators by researchers in the field of learning and instruction (e.g., Berney and Bétrancourt, 2016; Fiorella and Zhang, 2018; Xie et al., 2018). The present meta-analysis will attempt to check whether these characteristics moderate the effect of touchscreens on young children's learning outcomes.
Table 1
StudySample sizeAge (months)Learning material domainComparison groupTest
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