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Because of the continuous stream of touchscreen apps that are claimed to be educational and the increasing use of touchscreen devices in early childhood, considerable attention is being paid to the effect of touchscreens on young children's learning. However, the existing empirical findings in young child samples are not consistent. In this meta-analysis we tested the overall effect of touchscreen devices on young children's (0- to 5-year-olds) learning performance, as well as moderators of this effect, based on 36 empirical articles (79 effect sizes) involving 4,206 participants. The overall analysis showed a significant touchscreen learning effect (d = 0.46), indicating that young children indeed benefited from touchscreen learning. Interestingly, age, learning material domain, comparison group, and experimental environment significantly moderated the effect of touchscreen devices on young children's learning outcome. These findings shed light on the role of touchscreen-related physical experience in early childhood education.
Since Apple launched iPad in 2010, the whole world has begun to be obsessed with a new kind of technical products–touchscreen devices. The popularization of touchscreen devices has stoked public interest in its potential for early childhood education (Rideout, 2014; Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015; Apple, 2017). By March 2018, Apple reports that there have been over 180,000 educational applications (“apps”) designed specifically for education (Apple, 2018a). In a 2017 nationwide survey by Common Sense Media in the U.S., 98% children from birth to 8 live in a home with mobile devices, 95% of families with children this age have a smartphone, 78% have a tablet, and 42% of children have their own tablet device; 71% parents report that they have downloaded apps (including educational apps) for their children to use; 67% parents whose children use screen media say it helps their child's learning, and 80% of them at least somewhat agree that they are satisfied with the amount and quality of educational screen media available for their children (Rideout, 2017). In addition, touchscreen devices have been gaining wide acceptance in school settings, which has been a global phenomenon (Beach and Castek, 2015; Haßler et al., 2015; McLean, 2016; Chou et al., 2017). For example, with the rapid growth of mobile touchscreen technologies, BYOD (bring your own device) has become a feasible pedagogical strategy which is aimed at promoting students' active engagement during learning (Nortcliffe and Middleton, 2013). BYOD allows students (including young children) to bring their touchscreens or other devices into classrooms for learning goals (Nelson, 2012; New Media Consortium, 2015; Chou et al., 2017). Research showed that 43% of pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade students use mobile devices (e.g., touchscreens) for classroom activities, and they have been adopted as an innovative approach to support traditional learning and teaching practices (New Media Consortium, 2015). That means many children and teachers are authorized to learn and teach by touching the screens, which is more or less different from traditional non-technology-enhanced classroom settings. To some degree, thus, the prevalent enthusiasm for the application of touchscreen devices to early childhood education is literally playing its role in the process that young students learn as well as teachers teach (Hu and Garimella, 2014; New Media Consortium, 2015; Apple, 2017; Papadakis et al., 2017; Chambers et al., 2018).
Touchscreen-based app developers believe that their apps are able to promote young children's learning performance1 (Riconscente, 2013; Schroeder and Kirkorian, 2016; Apple, 2017; Herodotou, 2018b). It says on Apple's official website (Apple, 2018b) that iPad apps can help children “stay focused,” “ignite the creativity in every student,” and “bring their biggest ideas to life;” the power and flexibility of iPad can “transform how students learn about and connect with the world around them…make a history lesson as vivid as the present by restoring ancient artifacts, or even peer inside everyday objects to understand how they're put together.” With tools developed for teaching, iPad apps can make it easy for teachers to gain “valuable insight into each student's progress,” “focus on what's most important—teaching,” and even help teachers “evaluate students' long-term progress as they move toward statewide testing.” After highlighting the worldwide amazing success of iPad usage in education, Apple (2017) summarized that using iPad might have the following advantages: (1) improvement in academic performance; (2) increase in engagement and motivation; (3) rise in cost savings and resource efficiency; and (4) integrated focus on content quality and design. From those mentioned above, it seems that touchscreen apps have the potential to make learning and teaching more powerful, which is seemingly beneficial to the improvement of children's learning performance (Wang et al., 2016).
However, the effects of these so-called “educational” apps on learning outcome remain to be largely untested, especially during the early years after the introduction of iPad (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015). Only in recent years has this question been extensively and seriously concerned by scholars. The related empirical work has been published in journals such as Science (e.g., Berkowitz et al., 2015), Psychological Science (e.g., Choi and Kirkorian, 2016), Child Development (e.g., Zimmermann et al., 2017), Frontiers in Psychology (e.g., Tarasuik et al., 2018), Computers and Education (e.g., Walczak and Taylor, 2018), Computers in Human Behavior (e.g., Huber et al., 2016), etc. For the same purpose in previous work, the present study focused on reevaluating the impact of educational touchscreen devices on young children's learning outcome (i.e., whether learning by touching a screen could facilitate young children's learning outcome) by conducting a meta-analysis.
Consider a learning scenario in which a child plays an educational game on a hand-held device such as an iPad. The touchscreen interface of an iPad affords the possibility of physical interactivity such as touching an object on the screen with a finger by a continuous dragging manipulation or by a discrete tapping manipulation (Dubé and McEwen, 2015). The objective of this meta-analysis is to assess the potential pedagogic value of physical interactivity features of touchscreen devices.
The rationale of this meta-analysis is that an assessment of the overall influence of using touchscreen devices on young children's learning outcome is required before widely introducing touchscreen devices to their learning at home or in preschool. In just a few short years, dozens of studies have been conducted to verify the effect of touchscreen devices with physical interactivity features on young children's learning performance (e.g., Aladé et al., 2016; Huber et al., 2016; Kirkorian et al., 2016; Patchan and Puranik, 2016; Schroeder and Kirkorian, 2016). However, the mixed findings (i.e., some studies find positive effects of touchscreen on learning performance, but others find no or even negative effects, see section Research on Young Children's Touchscreen Learning) in this body of research call into question the robustness of this effect. Thus, it is worthwhile to determine whether touchscreen devices usage can work to improve child learning.
Viewing from a lifespan perspective of cognition, children's knowledge acquisition is likely to be based on their physical experience (Kontra et al., 2012; Loeffler et al., 2016; Setti and Borghi, 2018). This is to some extent in line with the viewpoint of early developmental psychologists (Piaget, 1952; Held and Hein, 1963). In the field of developmental and cognitive science, the notion that physical action and cognition are linked is actually not a novel concept (Glenberg et al., 2013). For instance, Piaget (1952) proposed that knowledge acquired by children is constructed through their actions and it is these body actions that subserve the creation of mental representations which are of importance to information processing. According to his theory, young children, even infants, construct a comprehension of the physical world through their own actions upon and engagement with the world. A body of subsequent research in young child samples confirmed the crucial impact of such physical experience on cognitive processes (e.g., Adolph and Avolio, 2000; Thelen et al., 2001; Smith, 2005; Hadzigeorgiou et al., 2009; Boncoddo et al., 2010; Becker et al., 2014; Mavilidi et al., 2015; Toumpaniari et al., 2015). Besides, effective learning occurs not only when children physically manipulate the materials (Glenberg et al., 2007), but also when they manipulate them in the form of imagination, as long as they possess enough imagining basis in some way, for example, by teaching children how to imagine during learning (Glenberg et al., 2004; Glenberg, 2011).
Because actions play a vital role in the process of young children's cognitive development (Piaget, 1952), it should be beneficial if a certain (virtual) environment is created to strengthen the link between young children's physical experience and their cognitive processing. Touchscreen devices provide a unique and virtual testbed for the effect of physical manipulation on children's learning (Baccaglini-Frank and Maracci, 2015; Wang et al., 2016). Extending the above idea of learning via physical experience and/or actions, scholars have strongly advocated that learning tools in an educational context should be designed in an embodied way (Abrahamson, 2014, 2015; Abrahamson and Lindgren, 2014). A touchscreen device is one of those embodiment-based tools providing access to learning through physical interaction because it invites a child to physically manipulate the elements (e.g., with a finger) presented on the screen. For example, with the help of an iPad a child can scrutinize an object through rotating or zooming it. These sensorimotor interactions and bodily engagement with the touchscreen learning environment contribute to the construction of children's mental representations as well as their cognitive processes (Wang et al., 2016; Yuill and Martin, 2016; Duijzer et al., 2017). Thus, learning from touchscreens is supposed to be potentially beneficial to student performance (Wang et al., 2016).
A series of empirical research has been conducted to examine whether touchscreen learning leads to a stable improvement of young children's learning outcome; however, this outcome has not yet received consistent support (e.g., Huber et al., 2016; Schroeder and Kirkorian, 2016; Wang et al., 2016; Furman et al., 2018), with some studies showing that touchscreen facilitates their learning performance, but others showing that touchscreen does not or even hinders learning performance (see below for details).
On the one hand, some studies have found that there was some beneficial effect of touchscreen devices on young children learning achievement (McKenna, 2012; Schacter and Jo, 2016; Wang et al., 2016; Papadakis et al., 2018). For example, a pre- and post-test study conducted by Wang et al. (2016) found that after 10 min of exposure to an iPad touchscreen app designed to teach how to tell time, the post-test scores of 5- to 6-year-old children were significantly higher than those at pre-test, supporting their prediction that children could benefit from the touchscreen itself. This positive role of touchscreen-based learning in learning outcome has also been proved in a limited number of studies of younger children (e.g., Patchan and Puranik, 2016) and even toddlers (e.g., Strouse and Ganea, 2017). On the other hand, the educational effect of touchscreens on young children's learning outcome has been questioned in some other studies (e.g., Schroeder and Kirkorian, 2016; Piotrowski and Krcmar, 2017; Zipke, 2017). Quite a few studies indicated that learning from touchscreens did not show superiority over other learning methods, for example, learning with physical objects (Huber et al., 2016), learning by watching on touchscreens (Aladé et al., 2016), or face-to-face paper teaching (Kwok et al., 2016). For instance, Aladé et al. (2016) asked preschool-aged children from 45 to 68 months to play an animal measuring game. Results on transfer performance indicated that participants who played the game through touching a tablet did not outperform their counterparts who viewed a video recorded version of the game that was otherwise identical in content to the interactive game. In addition, several studies even discovered a negative impact of touchscreen learning on child performance (e.g., Parish-Morris et al., 2013). Simply put, the mixed findings bring into question the robustness of touchscreen effect with respect to young children's learning. Fortunately, this question could be addressed through meta-analysis to synthesize and test the data from multiple empirical studies.
The above mixed findings at least indicate that not in all cases touchscreen technology has a positive effect on cognitive processing (Wang et al., 2016, p2). Part of the reason might be that there are some potential moderators of this effect. However, to our knowledge, there has been no call for a search for potential moderators in touchscreen learning research and touchscreen scholars have been primarily concerned with the question of whether touchscreen learning works, thus leading to no sufficient knowledge about when it works. To date, dozens of studies have been conducted to verify the touchscreen learning effect in samples of young children under 6 years old (see Table ), with different characteristics of participants (e.g., age), learning materials (e.g., learning material domain), and experimental designs (e.g., comparison condition, test media, experimental environment). These sets of characteristics are usually regarded as important potential moderators by researchers in the field of learning and instruction (e.g., Berney and Bétrancourt, 2016; Fiorella and Zhang, 2018; Xie et al., 2018). The present meta-analysis will make an attempt to check whether these characteristics moderate the effect of touchscreen on young children's learning outcome.
Based on the detailed exposition of pedagogic effect of touchscreens mentioned above, an obvious and crucial issue concerns that the generality of touchscreen effect on young children's learning is an open question. These inconsistencies were the impetus for our meta-analytic investigation. Specially, this meta-analysis was conducted to address the following two questions:
RQ1: Is learning by physically touching a screen effective for increasing young children's learning performance?
RQ2: Is there any potential moderators of the effect of touchscreens on young children's learning?
Before widely introducing touchscreen devices to young children's learning at home or in preschool, it is of value to evaluate the overall effect of touchscreen learning. Thus, the most important question we addressed was whether or not young children would benefit from learning via touchscreen devices featured by physical interactivity. According to the potential role of physical experience in cognitive processing, we hypothesized that the learning outcome would be better in touchscreen condition compared to non-touchscreen condition.
In consideration of the mixed findings on the effect of touchscreens on child learning, one might argue that it is the moderators of this effect that counts. However, because this moderator-related question has not been attached enough importance, in most cases there is no theoretical rationale or sufficient empirical evidence to justify hypotheses about moderators. On an exploratory basis, we examined the following moderators (a) age, (b) learning material domain (STEM vs. non-STEM), (c) comparison condition (baseline vs. traditional classroom teaching vs. mouse-based computers vs. paper vs. physical objects vs. watch on touchscreen), (d) test media (touchscreen devices vs. paper vs. physical objects vs. oral), and (e) experimental environment (classroom vs. laboratory vs. other). We chose these variables as potential moderators because (1) when considering relevant empirical research as a whole, these variables were either continuous or able to be divided into different subgroups, which is necessary for moderator analyses, and (2) they were usually regarded as important potential moderators by researchers in the field of learning and instruction (e.g., Berney and Bétrancourt, 2016; Fiorella and Zhang, 2018; Xie et al., 2018). Since it was difficult to provide a theoretical frame for these potential moderators and to make predictions about the moderators' roles in the effect of touchscreens on young children's learning, moderation analyses in the present study were treated as exploratory, rather than theory-based. Even so, these potential moderators should prove of interest to touchscreen learning researchers.
Touch panel technologies are a key theme in current digital devices, including smartphones, slate devices like the iPad, the screens on the backs of digital cameras, the Nintendo DS, and Windows 7 devices. The term touch panel encompasses various technologies for sensing the touch of a finger or stylus. In this session, we'll look at basic touch panel sensing methods and introduce the characteristics and optimal applications of each.
Note: Below is the translation from the Japanese of the ITmedia article "How Can a Screen Sense Touch? A Basic Understanding of Touch Panels"published September 27, 2010. Copyright 2011 ITmedia Inc. All Rights Reserved.
A touch panel is a piece of equipment that lets users interact with a computer by touching the screen directly. Incorporating features into the monitor like sensors that detect touch actions makes it possible to issue instructions to a computer by having it sense the position of a finger or stylus. Essentially, it becomes a device fusing the two functions of display and input.
It's perhaps not something we think of often, but touch panels have integrated themselves into every aspect of our lives. People who enjoy using digital devices like smartphones interact with touch panels all the time in everyday life—but so do others, at devices like bank ATMs, ticket vending machines in railway stations, electronic kiosks inside convenience stores, digital photo printers at mass merchandisers, library information terminals, photocopiers, and car navigation systems.
This session discusses touch panel systems
A major factor driving the spread of touch panels is the benefits they offer in the way of intuitive operation. Since they can be used for input through direct contact with icons and buttons, they're easy to understand and easily used, even by people unaccustomed to using computers. Touch panels also contribute to miniaturization and simplification of devices by combining display and input into a single piece of equipment. Since touch panel buttons are software, not hardware, their interfaces are easily changed through software.
Primary applications of LCD monitors with touch panels. These devices are used in many widespread spheres.
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While a touch panel requires a wide range of characteristics, including display visibility above all, along with precision in position sensing, rapid response to input, durability, and installation costs, their characteristics differ greatly depending on the methods used to sense touch input. Some typical touch-panel sensing methods are discussed below.
As of 2010, resistive film represented the most widely used sensing method in the touch panel market. Touch panels based on this method are called pressure-sensitive or analog-resistive film touch panels. In addition to standalone LCD monitors, this technology is used in a wide range of small to mid-sized devices, including smartphones, mobile phones, PDAs, car navigation systems, and the Nintendo DS.
With this method, the position on screen contacted by a finger, stylus, or other object is detected using changes in pressure. The monitor features a simple internal structure: a glass screen and a film screen separated by a narrow gap, each with a transparent electrode film (electrode layer) attached. Pressing the surface of the screen presses the electrodes in the film and the glass to come into contact, resulting in the flow of electrical current. The point of contact is identified by detecting this change in voltage.
The advantages of this system include the low-cost manufacture, thanks to its simple structure. The system also uses less electricity than other methods, and the resulting configurations are strongly resistant to dust and water since the surface is covered in film. Since input involves pressure applied to the film, it can be used for input not just with bare fingers, but even when wearing gloves or using a stylus. These screens can also be used to input handwritten text.
Drawbacks include lower light transmittance (reduced display quality) due to the film and two electrode layers; relatively lower durability and shock resistance; and reduced precision of detection with larger screen sizes. (Precision can be maintained in other ways—for example, splitting the screen into multiple areas for detection.)
Capacitive touch panels represent the second most widely used sensing method after resistive film touch panels. Corresponding to the terms used for the above analog resistive touch panels, these also are called analog capacitive touch panels. Aside from standalone LCD monitors, these are often used in the same devices with resistive film touch panels, such as smartphones and mobile phones.
With this method, the point at which the touch occurs is identified using sensors to sense minor changes in electrical current generated by contact with a finger or changes in electrostatic capacity (load). Since the sensors react to the static electrical capacity of the human body when a finger approaches the screen, they also can be operated in a manner similar to moving a pointer within an area touched on screen.
Two types of touch panels use this method: surface capacitive touch panels and projective capacitive touch panels. The internal structures differ between the two types.
Surface capacitive touch panels
Surface capacitive touch panels are often used in relatively large panels. Inside these panels, a transparent electrode film (electrode layer) is placed atop a glass substrate, covered by a protective cover. Electric voltage is applied to electrodes positioned in the four corners of the glass substrate, generating a uniform low-voltage electrical field across the entire panel. The coordinates of the position at which the finger touches the screen are identified by measuring the resulting changes in electrostatic capacity at the four corners of the panel.
While this type of capacitive touch panel has a simpler structure than a projected capacitive touch panel and for this reason offers lower cost, it is structurally difficult to detect contact at two or more points at the same time (multi-touch).
Projected capacitive touch panels
Projected capacitive touch panels are often used for smaller screen sizes than surface capacitive touch panels. They've attracted significant attention in mobile devices. The iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad use this method to achieve high-precision multi-touch functionality and high response speed.
The internal structure of these touch panels consists of a substrate incorporating an IC chip for processing computations, over which is a layer of numerous transparent electrodes is positioned in specific patterns. The surface is covered with an insulating glass or plastic cover. When a finger approaches the surface, electrostatic capacity among multiple electrodes changes simultaneously, and the position were contact occurs can be identified precisely by measuring the ratios between these electrical currents.
A unique characteristic of a projected capacitive touch panel is the fact that the large number of electrodes enables accurate detection of contact at multiple points (multi-touch). However, the projected capacitive touch panels featuring indium-tin-oxide (ITO) found in smartphones and similar devices are poorly suited for use in large screens, since increased screen size results in increased resistance (i.e., slower transmission of electrical current), increasing the amount of error and noise in detecting the points touched.
Larger touch panels use center-wire projected capacitive touch panels in which very thin electrical wires are laid out in a grid as a transparent electrode layer. While lower resistance makes center-wire projected capacitive touch panels highly sensitive, they are less suited to mass production than ITO etching.
Above, we've summarized the differences between the two types of capacitive touch panels. The overall characteristics of such panels include the fact that unlike resistive film touch panels, they do not respond to touch by clothing or standard styli. They feature strong resistance to dust and water drops and high durability and scratch resistance. In addition, their light transmittance is higher, as compared to resistive film touch panels.
On the other hand, these touch panels require either a finger or a special stylus. They cannot be operated while wearing gloves, and they are susceptible to the effects of nearby metal structures.
Surface acoustic wave (SAW) touch panels were developed mainly to address the drawbacks of low light transmittance in resistive film touch panels—that is, to achieve bright touch panels with high levels of visibility. These are also called surface wave or acoustic wave touch panels. Aside from standalone LCD monitors, these are widely used in public spaces, in devices like point-of-sale terminals, ATMs, and electronic kiosks.
These panels detect the screen position where contact occurs with a finger or other object using the attenuation in ultrasound elastic waves on the surface. The internal structure of these panels is designed so that multiple piezoelectric transducers arranged in the corners of a glass substrate transmit ultrasound surface elastic waves as vibrations in the panel surface, which are received by transducers installed opposite the transmitting ones. When the screen is touched, ultrasound waves are absorbed and attenuated by the finger or other object. The location is identified by detecting these changes. Naturally, the user does not feel these vibrations when touching the screen. These panels offer high ease of use.
The strengths of this type of touch panel include high light transmittance and superior visibility, since the structure requires no film or transparent electrodes on the screen. Additionally, the surface glass provides better durability and scratch resistance than a capacitive touch panel. Another advantage is that even if the surface does somehow become scratched, the panel remains sensitive to touch. (On a capacitive touch panel, surface scratches can sometimes interrupt signals.) Structurally, this type of panel ensures high stability and long service life, free of changes over time or deviations in position.
Weak points include compatibility with only fingers and soft objects (such as gloves) that absorb ultrasound surface elastic waves. These panels require special-purpose styluses and may react to substances like water drops or small insects on the panel.
All in all, however, these touch panels offer relatively few drawbacks. Recent developments such as improvements in manufacturing technology are also improving their cost-performance.
The category of optical touch panels includes multiple sensing methods. The number of products employing infrared optical imaging touch panels based on infrared image sensors to sense position through triangulation has grown in recent years, chiefly among larger panels.
A touch panel in this category features one infrared LED each at the left and right ends of the top of the panel, along with an image sensor (camera). Retroreflective tape that reflects incident light along the axis of incidence is affixed along the remaining left, right, and bottom sides. When a finger or other object touches the screen, the image sensor captures the shadows formed when the infrared light is blocked. The coordinates of the location of contact are derived by triangulation.
While this type differs somewhat from the above touch panels, let's touch on the subject of electromagnetic induction touch panels. This method is used in devices like LCD graphics tablets, tablet PCs, and purikura photo sticker booths.
This input method for graphics tablets, which originally did not feature monitors, achieves high-precision touch panels by combining a sensor with the LCD panel. When the user touches the screen with a special-purpose stylus that generates a magnetic field, sensors on the panel receive the electromagnetic energy and use it to sense the position of the pen.
Since a special-purpose stylus is used for input, input using a finger or a general-purpose stylus is not possible, and the method has limited applications. Still, this has both good and bad points. It eliminates input errors due to the surrounding environment or unintended screen manipulation. Since the technology was intended for use in graphics tablets, it offers superior sensor precision—making it possible, for example, to change line width smoothly by precisely sensing the pressure with which the stylus is pressed against the screen (electrostatic capacity). This design approach also gives the screen high light transmittance and durability.
The table below summarizes the characteristics of the touch panels we've looked at. Keep in mind that even in devices based on the same sensing method, performance and functions can vary widely in the actual products. Use this information only as an introduction to general product characteristics. Additionally, given daily advances in touch-panel technological innovations and cost reductions, the information below is only a snapshot of current trends as of September 2010.
Differences in and characteristics of main touch-panel sensing methods Sensing method Resistive film Capacitive SAW Infrared optical imaging Electromagnetic induction Light transmittance Not so good Good Good Excellent Excellent Finger touch Excellent Excellent Excellent Excellent No Gloved touch Excellent No Good Excellent No Stylus touch Excellent Not so good (special-purpose stylus) Good (depends on material) Good (depends on material) Excellent (special-purpose stylus) Durability Not so good Excellent Excellent Excellent Excellent Resistance to water drops Excellent Excellent Not so good Good Excellent Cost Reasonable Not so reasonable Reasonable Not so reasonable Not so reasonableEach touch-panel type offers its own strengths and weaknesses. No single sensing method currently offers overwhelming superiority in all aspects. Choose a product after considering the intended use and environmental factors.
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