Improving educational opportunities with learning apps

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Frank Niklas is Professor for Educational Psychology and Family Studies at LMU. As part of the ERC project “Learning4Kids”, the LMU researcher and his team looked at how useful learning apps are in preparing children for school. To do so, he and his team first developed some suitable games. After four years of research, it is time to take stock.

Children are not all on the same level when they start school. Some already have lots of skills and can maybe even read. Others do not have a single book in the house. How can opportunities be made more equal?

Frank Niklas: That is the pivotal problem. We will never completely eliminate the fact that children arrive at school from different starting points. Our workgroup’s strategy is to keep the differences as small as possible, and to get children to a similar level even before they start school. The earlier we support children, the better are the chances of realizing positive effects. James Heckman studied this issue from an economic perspective and won the Nobel Prize, because he was able to show that the earlier an intervention takes place, the more effective it is.

You have attempted to improve children’s initial chances by using learning apps. Why apps in particular?

The question we always ask ourselves is: How can we reach as many people as possible – especially those that do not have the best resources, that are completely unaware of certain offerings owing to cultural and financial barriers, for example. In contrast, new media are a very good option as we now live in a society where these tools are very widespread from earliest childhood to old age.

Educational apps: from good to harmful

Why did you deliberately develop the apps yourself?

We developed our own apps to make sure that they met certain standards. The app stores already have more than 500,000 learning apps that are labeled as “educational”. But the problem is that most have never been evaluated.

At the behest of Stiftung Lesen, a foundation that promotes reading, I myself took part in a panel that analyzed reading apps. So I know that what you find on the market varies tremendously. There are good apps that I would recommend. But there are also a whole raft of apps where the educational design is all wrong. They contain mistakes and make learning more difficult, or even constitute a hindrance to learning.

Many parents feel out of their depth when trying to decide which apps are the right ones. In the long term, we would need objective and transparent quality criteria.

What did you especially pay attention to in your own apps?

We took our cue from a ground-breaking study by Hirsh-Pasek et al and tried to adopt four of the criteria formulated in this study. One is “active learning”, which means that cognitive stimulation must be there. The second is “engaged learning”, meaning that children should be able to immerse themselves in what they are learning without distraction. One typical problem in apps is that figures or in-app ads are constantly popping up, or that music sequences suddenly start. All that distracts children from learning. The next criterion is “meaningful learning”: The children should learn something that relates to their everyday life.

Lastly, the most difficult criterion, and one which learning apps seldom achieve, is “social interactive learning”. This is because children learn best when they are not left alone with their devices, but when an adult whom they know or older brothers and sisters are there, too, to support them.

The ERC project “Learning4Kids”

You have tested your apps in recent years. How did you do that?

Before deploying the apps in our study, we measured the children’s skills in the disciplines we were investigating. We set up a four-group design. One group started with the math apps, the second began with the literacy apps. The third had learning apps that provided more general tasks focusing on concentration and memory training. A fourth group had no apps at all. The children were then given just under six months to play freely with these apps at home in the family. We suggested that they should ideally use the apps as regularly as possible, but for shorter periods of no more than 10 or 15 minutes a day. In the families, this proposal was acted on to widely differing extents. Some children hardly ever used the apps, others used them considerably more. On average, they spent 5 or 6 minutes a day playing with them: We recorded the time spent using the apps very accurately.

And what was the outcome?

We measured their skills at different intervals. We found that the children who had the apps noticeably improved their skills in the given discipline, even after controlling for social status, intelligence, migration background, child age and gender. The improvement was even greater for language skills than in mathematics. What we had hoped to see – that using high-quality learning apps was helpful – thus turned out to be the case.

Our study design then went a step further: After the first six months, a second test period began in which the apps were swapped. Anyone who had the math apps first time around was now given the literacy apps, and vice versa.

The exciting thing for us was to discover that, after a year, the group that began with the apps focusing on language development recorded significantly better achievements in both areas. Conversely, the group that began with the math app fell back in numeracy skills as far as if they had never even had the apps.

How do you explain that?

In our view these findings indicate that it makes sense to begin with a language development training before training mathematical content. Our publication on this topic is still in the pipeline and will hopefully appear next year.

The role of the parents

Did you also investigate the parents’ behavior and what influence they had?

We had hoped that the parents would be more on board. We had urged them to work together with the children on the tablets as far as possible. In this regard, our project was, sadly, a failure: What we often hear from everyday life – that parents give their children media when they themselves need to do something else – was confirmed in our study. And that was irrespective of educational background and other factors.

So it would have been better if the parents had also spent time with their children on the learning apps?

We very clearly recommended that children should not be left alone with learning apps. It makes much more sense to be there in person, to help out and maybe give them a bit of extra information here and there. This would be invaluable. Moreover, children appreciate it when their parents take the time and get involved.

Support children appropriately

How useful are interventions such as those you developed compared to other development measures?

The findings we reached are significant and important. But it is not as if the children were suddenly twice as good. Learning apps are tiny building blocks that can play an important role because with apps we can reach all children. But you can’t expect them to be a panacea. There are simply too many factors that influence a child’s development.

I am often asked whether digital media are really necessary at nurseries. This is a very reasonable question, and the digital activities should on no account replace the analogue ones. I see learning apps as an add-on tool. There are very good examples of how tablets can be used as a complement whenever the need arises. That is definitely not to say that the whole nursery routine should be changed from the ground up. But to my mind, closing oneself off to this option is equally wrong. The EU guarantees a right to education and participation, and that applies even for young children. We know that digital media is here to stay in our world, and it is important to develop media skills at an early age. So especially for children who scarcely learn these skills at home because media are simply consumed without much thought in their environment, nurseries already have an initial educational function.

You conduct research into early educational opportunities and how parents influence children’s later life. Is there anything that can really compensate for different starting conditions?

That is a very individual matter. You can’t make general statements. The family is an important place of socialization, which is why we study it. If children’s development is not encouraged at home, this is obviously a disadvantage. Many studies show that the formal education system in nurseries and schools does not fully make up for this drawback. Especially in a child’s early years, the influence of the family is still far greater.

But having said that, if a child has favorable individual characteristics and has acquired specific skills, you then have to ask to what extent he or she may supported outside the family at the right time. For example, if it becomes apparent that a child has never looked at a book, and if the family then receives support, a lot can be done to level things up. Sadly, however, that happens all too rarely in reality, because such measures are expensive. Children fall through the gaps and their needs are not identified. So we still have a lot of work to do in the political arena, for educational institutions and for society as a whole.

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Frank Niklas is Professor for Educational Psychology and Family Studies at LMU. His research project “Learning4Kids” earned him one of the European Research Council’s prestigious Starting Grants. Right now, Niklas is continuing to work on the question of how to motivate parents to get more involved in accompanying their children’s use of learning apps. At the same time, his team is currently evaluating the data to determine how lasting the use of learning apps is until children reach school age. For example, the psychologist sees room for further improvement in adaptive learning thanks to artificial intelligence. In other projects, Niklas is researching media skills in pre-schools and intellectual giftedness in children.

Event:

A conference concluding the Learning4Kids study will be held in Munich on Friday, 24 January 2025. The event will be in English; attendance is free of charge. To sign up or for more information, please contact Tina Schiele at T.Schiele@psy.lmu.de

Publications:

On the effectiveness of learning apps:

Frank Niklas u.a.: Learning Apps at home prepare children for school. In: Child Development. Oktober 2024
https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.14184

Astrid Wirth u.a.: Evaluating educational apps for preschoolers: Differences and agreements between the assessments of experts, parents, and their children. In: Computers in Human Behavior. November 2024
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563224002292?via%3Dihub

Tina Schiele u.a.: The effectiveness of game-based literacy app learning in preschool children from different background. In: Learning and Individual Differences. Januar 2024 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2024.102579

Synopsis of the study and study protocols:

Frank Niklas u.a.: App-based learning for kindergarten children at home (Learning4Kids): Study protocol for cohort 1 and the kindergarten assessments. In: BMC Pediatrics, Dezember 2020 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12887-020-02432-y

Frank Niklas u.a.: App-based learning for kindergarten children at home (Learning4Kids): Study protocol for cohort 2 and the school assessments. In: BMC Pediatrics, Dezember 2022 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12887-022-03737-w