Sustaining Engagement with Educational Digital Media

• In Event: Children's and Adolescents' Technology Use to Enhance Cognitive and Educational Outcomes

Abstract

Engagement with resources is a key ingredient for learning: an intervention, a curriculum, a digital technology can be of the highest quality, but will not yield positive outcomes if learners are not actively engaged with the resources. Research across disciplines shows that engagement is a precursor of and catalyst for learning (Xhembulla et al., 2014; Bitgood, 2010; Packer, 2010). Of the many behaviors that can indicate engagement (e.g., attention, effort, immersion), time spent actively using intervention materials has been a common proxy for engagement (Lippke et al., 2016). Unfortunately, earlier work has also shown that time spent with digital resources typically declines over the course of a study, with an initial flurry of excitement followed by a sharp drop in usage (see Figure 1; Pasnik et al., 2015). Our focus here is on educational digital media, both videos and interactive games, and how to stabilize children’s engagement over the course of short (8-9 week) home-based interventions.

Across multiple studies, we have developed an app designed to deliver intervention resources (i.e., games and videos) to children in a naturalistic way while simultaneously tracking usage. In a recent study of 127 low-income first graders, we also used the app to sustain engagement over a 9-week intervention, by staggering the release of intervention videos on a weekly basis. All three intervention games, however, were available immediately at study start through a link in the app. Our analyses of overall usage showed the typical sharp drop after the first week. But a comparison of game and video usage separately showed that, while engagement with the games dropped after an initial high rate of use, engagement with the videos did not (Figure 2). While initial engagement with the video content was much lower than the games and did drop after the first week, video usage in the following weeks remained substantively the same and even increased slightly in the final weeks. Additional analyses for this talk will look at repeated viewing of video content and content coverage, to see if the staggered release also resulted in increased engagement by those metrics.

In sum, the staggered release of videos appears to result in more sustained child engagement in intervention materials, at least over the course of 8-9 weeks. It is possible, however, that the content of videos was consistently more engaging, or that COVID-19 quarantining drove children’s use of these resources rather than our release mechanism. In today’s era of on-demand binge watching, it remains an open question whether “dosage” of engagement impacts learning outcomes. Emerging research shows that memories formed during binge watching (i.e., six one-hour episodes in one day) decay more rapidly than those formed after daily or weekly viewing of the same number of episodes (Horvath et al., 2017). Our study attempts to contribute to the much needed research in determining whether engagement patterns (e.g., sustained low-dose engagement vs. initial high engagement that tapers off) matter at all for learning.

Authors

• Joy Lorenzo Kennedy, Education Development Center - New York
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jaime Gutierrez, Education Development Center - New York
  Presenting Author

• Alexia Raynal, Education Development Center - New York
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alice Kaiser, EDC
  Non-Presenting Author