Despite the acknowledged complexity of early childhood educators' work, little is documented about how early childhood educators actually spend their time at work. A typical way of studying time at work is through the use of time-use diaries. Recent developments have shown the benefits of using randomized sampling electronic time-use diaries. This…

The purpose of this study was to examine character racial, ethnic, and gender representation of main and secondary of apps designed for preschoolers using a quantitative content analysis. Because of the design of characters for apps differs from other forms of media, this study examined traits associated with racial, ethnic, and gender groups…

The early childhood education (ECE) sector has been subjected to increased governance, which has manifested in an increased focus on monitoring and steering the daily life of preschools. It is well documented that instruments of governance change teachers' priorities and practices. Changes are not always in line with the aims of the governing…

The usage of high-quality learning applications (apps) at home may increase children's mathematical and literacy competencies. This approach was tested in a family intervention study. Intervention families (n = 302) in two German cohorts (N = 500; M (SD)[subscript age] = 61.0 (4.6) months; n[female gender symbol] = 302) received tablets with newly…

Introduction: The main objective of this study was to validate six educational applications developed to train the cognitive precursors associated with mathematics learning in early childhood education students. Method: The mathematical performance of 193 preschool students aged 57 to 79 months (M=63.3, SD=3.7) from various schools was assessed…

Longitudinal studies on mainstream children and training studies in the dyslexic population suggest that visual attention span (VAS) abilities contribute to reading acquisition. We evaluated to what extent VAS training in beginning readers might enhance later literacy skills. A large cohort of 453 children was followed from the beginning to the…

This study investigates user experience (UX) priorities in early childhood education applications by analyzing Korean-language user reviews using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers topic modeling (BERTopic). Eighteen latent topics were extracted and systematically mapped to the eight software quality characteristics defined by…

Context: In the children's education process, not only children but parents, educators, and teachers are using touchscreen technology-enabled contrivances for better quality of life. Every stakeholder has their perspective on the usage of touchscreen contrivances. A lot of moderators and critical factors affect this perception. Objective: To…

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) has received widespread attention worldwide and technology companies designed educational applications (apps) focusing on STEM. Young children have access to tablets and smartphones and they engage with a variety of apps every day. Prior research showed that young children learn from…

Many technological interventions have leveraged physical activity (PA, i.e., activities that involve whole-body movements) to provide young people with active and productive learning experiences. However, there is a lack of systematic understanding of how PA can serve as a learning medium--for example, how PA can support learning and how to design…

Educational applications (apps) are ubiquitous within children's learning environments and emerging evidence has demonstrated their efficacy. However, it remains unclear what the active ingredients (ie, mechanisms), or combination of ingredients, of successful maths apps are. The current study developed a new, open-access, three-step framework for…

In this article, we draw on assemblage theory to investigate how children aged 5 engage with different material surfaces to explore ordinal and relational aspects of number. The children participate in an activity in which they first interact with a strip on the floor, then with a multi-touch iPad application, to work with numbers in expressive…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, kindergartens in Hong Kong have sought ways in which to support children's learning at home while schools were closed. We report on a proof-of-concept study: short videos intended to support playful learning at home were distributed to parents/caregivers of preschool children via a smartphone app; toys and a storybook…

Digital devices such as iPads are prevalent in children's play from an early age. How this shapes young children's play is an area of considerable debate without any clear consensus on how different forms of play are brought into the iPad interaction. In this study, we examined 98 play activities of children in two preschool settings, featuring 2…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of mLearning or mobile device practice on the attention and accuracy of student's use of math concepts, specifically, telling time. A single subject, alternating treatment design was used to compare mLearning to paper and pencil practice in four 3rd grade male students. Results were mixed;…