Emotions, private speech, involvement and other aspects of young children's interactions with educational apps

Abstract

The aim of this study is to evaluate how young children use and interact with mobile applications by observing the reactions and behaviour of four-year-old children while interacting with fifteen educational apps. A multimodal non-intrusive research procedure was applied to twelve participants in a kindergarten in Brazil. Structured observations and qualitative fieldnotes were employed to assess game understanding and achievement, emotions, level of involvement, private speech and speech to the researcher through the child's facial expressions, behaviour and verbalizations. Principal Component Analysis exposes three dimensions of young children's interactions with educational apps: game access, active engagement with the activities, and the social speech that is generated from playing the game. The field notes also alowed specific app features to be identified that may complicate or support the children's interactions. The study offers an operational definition of children's interactions with digital devices in educational contexts that could support the future evidence-based design and an assessment of digital resources for effective game-based learning in early childhood.