Investigating the educational potential of touchscreen apps for children's early vocabulary acquisition

Assessing the educational potential and language content of touchscreen apps for preschool children (2022)
Journal Article
Taylor, G., Kolak, J., Norgate, S., & Monaghan, P. (2022). Assessing the educational potential and language content of touchscreen apps for preschool children. Computers and education open, 3, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.caeo.2022.100102

Touchscreen apps have the potential to teach children important early skills including oral language. However, there is little empirical data assessing the educational potential of children's apps in the app market or how apps link to theories of cog... Read More about Assessing the educational potential and language content of touchscreen apps for preschool children.

Language in educational apps for pre-schoolers. A comparison of grammatical constructions and psycholinguistic features in apps, books and child directed speech (2022)
Journal Article
Kolak, J., Monaghan, P., & Taylor, G. (2022). Language in educational apps for pre-schoolers. A comparison of grammatical constructions and psycholinguistic features in apps, books and child directed speech. Journal of Child Language, 28, 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000922000198

Language in touchscreen apps could be useful as an additional source of children’s language input, alongside child directed speech (CDS) and books. Here we performed the first analysis of language in apps, as compared with books and CDS. We analysed... Read More about Language in educational apps for pre-schoolers. A comparison of grammatical constructions and psycholinguistic features in apps, books and child directed speech.

Selecting educational apps for preschool children : how useful are website app rating systems? (2022)
Journal Article
Taylor, G., Kolak, J., Bent, E., & Monaghan, P. (2022). Selecting educational apps for preschool children : how useful are website app rating systems?. British Journal of Educational Technology, 53(5), 1262-1282. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13199

In the present paper, we assess whether website rating systems are useful for selecting educational apps for preschool age children. We selected the 10 highest scoring and 10 lowest scoring apps for 2–4-year-olds from two widely used websites (Good A... Read More about Selecting educational apps for preschool children : how useful are website app rating systems?.

A balanced Digital Diet for under 5s: a commentary on Orben (2021) (2022)
Journal Article

Orben (2021) proposed a ‘Digital Diet’ approach to thinking about children's consumption of digital media. Here, we consider the Digital Diet with a focus on young children under 5. As well as discussing how Type and Amount apply to this age group, w... Read More about A balanced Digital Diet for under 5s: a commentary on Orben (2021).

Developing evaluation tools for assessing the educational potential of apps for preschool children in the UK (2020)
Journal Article

Selecting high quality apps can be challenging for caregivers and educators. We here develop tools evaluating educational potential of apps for preschool children. In Study 1, we developed two complementary evaluation tools tailored to different audi... Read More about Developing evaluation tools for assessing the educational potential of apps for preschool children in the UK.