Poster #82 - What do parents look for in math apps for young children?

• In Event: Poster Session 05

Abstract

Math skills acquired before children begin school predict later math ability (Duncan et al., 2007; Geary et al., 2018). Parents play a critical role in their children’s foundational math acquisition by providing math activities and interactions (Hart et al., 2016). Math apps are readily available and have the potential to be one of the math activities provided to young children by parents. High-quality math apps can improve math skills (Berkowitz et al., 2015), however many educational apps are of poor quality (Meyer et al., 2021). Given the broad array of math apps available for young learners, it is important to understand parents’ app selection.

Forty-five parents of children aged 3-6 years old completed a survey and engaged in hands-on exploration of four numeracy apps previously rated to be of varying quality (Lee et al., 2019). Parents identified math app features that were most important to them when choosing apps for their children (see Figure 1). Almost half of the parents endorsed three criteria: age appropriateness (51%), educational value (49%), and fun (47%). In addition, consistent with previous research (Broekman et al., 2016), many parents (42%) indicated that they wanted an app their child could play independently. As expected, many parents also wanted an app with clear instructions (42%). Few parents (22%), however, considered the feedback for correct and incorrect answers to be an important feature of a math app, despite that being an essential component of effective math apps in the literature (Callaghan & Reich, 2020).

Of the three features identified as important most often by parents, only educational value significantly predicted parents’ overall ratings of the four apps, such that parents who said educational value was important rated all four apps overall more positively than parents who did not select educational value as important, β = .26, p = .02. These parents who indicated educational value was important also reported significantly higher confidence teaching math to their young children than parents who did not indicate educational value was important, t = -2.24, p <.001. This is notable because the apps in our study varied in quality of math content, such that only one app was “good”, whereas the other three were mediocre or poor (see Table 1). However, parents who have high math teaching confidence perceived these apps were of overall better quality than did parents who had low math teaching confidence. In addition, only 20% of parents indicated that they always play a math app before giving it to their child. Together these findings suggest that when an app is marketed as “educational”, that may be enough for some parents seeking educational apps to download and rate it positively.

Overall, the results of this study identify some features of math apps parents look for and how the features they value may affect their math app choices for their children. Considering concerns about children’s foundational math skills, it is important to understand parents’ potential contribution to support early math learning using easily available technological tools.

Authors

• Nicola Urquhart, Wilfrid Laurier University
  Presenting Author

• Joanne N. Lee, Wilfrid Laurier University

• Eileen Wood, Wilfrid Laurier University