Earlier this month the Joan Ganz Cooney Center released the latest in a line of tracking studies of the educational apps marketplace in collaboration with our colleagues at New America.  What we found was—to be blunt—worrisome.  Progress in the development of scientifically-informed early learning apps that parents and educators can easily find is far too slow. In the 5 years we have been digging into the apps marketplace (aka. “The digital Wild West”, we have frankly seen only scant progress in a development process that needs to be much more transparent, outcomes driven, and tuned into the needs of today’s more modern, more diverse families.  Previously our blog has featured the perspectives of the co-authors of Getting a Read on the App Store, Sarah Vaala, who shared her perspectives as a literacy researcher and new mom, and Anna Ly, who wrote about the findings from her industry and media design perch at Sesame Workshop.

Today’s entry contemplates how, in this holiday season, a parent or educator might use our work to their benefit. What are the key take-always that a discerning adult might use, for example in deciding which app to purchase with a young child’s future literacy skills development on their minds?  As always we value your feedback on our work and wish you a happy and healthy New Year!  —Michael H. Levine

Photo: Brian O’Hagan

It’s the holiday season, and families everywhere are playing on digital devices at home and on the road. If you’ve got kids, and a smartphone or tablet, you have probably found yourself poking around the app stores in search of a great new game that will not only entertain your child, but hopefully help them learn something too. Developers know this—the educational apps category of Apple’s App Store alone has at least 80,000 titles. Our research suggests that most parents and educators find it daunting to swipe through screen after screen of “educational” apps without knowing what kinds of standards there might be. How’s a parent supposed to find what’s best for their child? And how does someone who develops really great apps get their products into the hands of the families who would most enjoy them?

As we head into the new year, we wanted to take a minute to reflect on the findings of Getting a Read on the App Stores, our most recent survey of the apps stories and what they mean for parents who are looking to facilitate the literacy development of their young children—and the developers who are creating apps for these users.

When we embarked on this study in 2014, our teams at the Cooney Center and New America, led by Sarah Vaala and Anna Ly, decided to put ourselves into the shoes of parents looking for great apps for their kids. If we were looking for some high-quality educational apps for young children (which we defined as from birth to age 8) to teach them literacy skills, what would we find?

Parents are finding most of the apps that they download from browsing the app stores. With that in mind, we wanted to learn more about what they were likely to encounter while browsing the most popular paid and free apps in the Apple App Store, Google Play, and Amazon Appstore. Among the literacy apps for children, what kinds of apps were among the most popular? How much information would a parent find while browsing the app stores to help them make decisions? And once an app had been downloaded, what would our families find? We also scanned the award-winning or highly-reviewed apps lists at three of the expert review sites, Common Sense Media, the Children’s Technology Review and Parents’ Choice to see what kind of overlap there might be in these lists—did experts agree that the most popular apps in the marketplace were the best?

After digging into the data for months, we realized there are key factors which can help a parent make informed decisions. And prepared with the right kind of knowledge, developers can help parents find their apps too. Here are some highlights of what we found that we think might be of interest.

• Parents are likely to find different apps depending on where they look
  The featured or most popular apps on an app store may be very different from those highlighted by review sites. We found that the most popular apps may not be as highly rated as other apps for any number of reasons—so we encourage parents to look beyond the lists of top apps in the storefronts. Explore expert review sites like Common Sense Media, and ask teachers and librarians for recommendations.

• Parents are looking for age-appropriate apps for their children
  Approximately 40% of apps did not provide a specific age range or developmental stage in their descriptions. Of those that did, 90% of the literacy-focused apps in our sample were aimed at preschool-age children. This suggests that parents should cast a wider net when searching for apps for older children, tapping expert review sites or librarians and teachers for advice.

• Most apps do not mention specific benchmarks of educational quality
  Was there a child development or literacy expert on the team that produced this app? Is there a guiding curriculum or educational theory? What kind of research has been conducted to support an app’s claims to teach specific skills or concepts? We found that these questions were largely unanswered in the descriptions of the apps that we analyzed. While this does not necessarily suggest that there was no research conducted by or on behalf of the developers whose apps we looked at, parents and educators would feel more confidence downloading apps for their children that provide evidence of efficacy.

• Research suggests that children learn well through co-use
  Unfortunately, few apps are designed to enable more than one participant to engage with an app. Does an app encourage an older user to play along? Can users create content together? The benefits of “joint media engagement” are significant when generations “learn together.”

• Share feedback
  Parents and educators have the power to influence design!  They should be more active to voice questions and concerns with individual developers or about the app stores in general. Whether by leaving a review, contacting a developer, or leaving feedback for the app stores in general, we suggest that parents can help push the market for high quality apps.

The Cooney Center and New America are strong advocates for the development of industry-wide standards for the education category, and we want to make sure that parents are aware that there are review sites that can help them make decisions. But until that happens, parents and educators will continue to rely heavily on the descriptions that developers provide as they scan the Top Apps lists. Perhaps, armed with the knowledge that can be gleaned from our scan, developers can help parents discover the kinds of apps that they are looking for (or perhaps didn’t even know they were looking for) while improving their own chances of rising to the top of the class.

Last week we released Getting a Read on the App Stores by Sarah Vaala, Anna Ly, and Michael Levine. Here, Anna provides some tips for developers who are creating literacy apps for young children from an industry perspective.

Getting a Read on the App Stores

Ever since Apple’s App Store launched in 2008, business analysts, developers, and designers have been trying to figure out how to get their app to the top through bursts of marketing, thoughtful design, or carefully crafting keywords. As more apps get uploaded to the store, the competition becomes more fierce. No one knows for certain how the algorithms work for each of the app stores though some app marketing firms speculate that factors like the number of downloads, ratings, and engagement may be taken into account. It gets even more complicated as search algorithms are changed from time to time. The most recent one that we are aware of seems to have improved the results that are returned when searching for apps, surfacing more relevant results and competing apps. This is good news for developers who may see their product jump to the top of a search results page. And for users, especially parents, this could potentially help them better sort through the thousands and thousands of apps for their children.

In general, information about the algorithms, download trends, user habits and preferences, and other analytics could potentially be gold for developers, helping them better design and market their apps to reach their target audience. And hopefully, that information could help bring to light better learning apps to the families hard at work trying to discover them. Companies like App Annie and Fiksu offer services to developers that help them sort through all that data.

To help parents, designers, and developers, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and New America Foundation have produced Getting a Read on the App Stores, a scan of the top literacy apps for children in the Apple App Store, Google Play, and Amazon Appstore. Though a sliver of the giant realm of apps, we found that literacy apps for young children made up a good chunk of apps in the education categories of the stores. The goal of the study was to put ourselves in the shoes of the parents. If we were parents trying to find apps that could help our kids learn to read, what would we find? What would be at the top of the heap? What would we find if we tried going to sites that apparently guide our choices? And once we downloaded the apps, what would our kids encounter? These were just a few of the questions we sought to answer during our study.

After the months-long scan, we discovered that there was a dearth of certain qualities in children’s literacy apps that made it into our sample, which was made up of titles on the Top 50 Free and Top 50 Paid Education category apps of the Apple App Store, Google Play, and Amazon Appstore, and Expert Awarded Apps from Common Sense Media, Parent Choice Awards, and Children’s Technology Review. We highlight these qualities in case folks want to figure out how they could potentially stand out from the crowd. However, note that this doesn’t necessarily mean that this could lead to leaping past other apps to the top. There are a multitude of factors that impact that journey, and this may be one of them. And some of these rare qualities also stand out because research claims that they increase learning and engagement. Take a look at a few of these uncommon features that might make your app stand out from the crowd.

Joint Media Engagement
Few apps in our sample had explicit functions within the apps that allowed for joint media engagement. Only a handful of apps allowed children to share content, connect socially through the app, or co-use it with others like their caregivers. Specifically just two had functions such as collaborative or competitive play with another player and 10% allowed users to contact or share content with others either through e-mail, text, or in the app. This is especially intriguing because researchers have found that connecting with others through media and using media together could help deepen children’s learning.

Benchmarks of Educational Quality
Research indicates that qualities like relevant expertise on the development team, an underlying curriculum guiding content development, and research testing of the program’s usability and efficacy reflect deliberate development decisions that tend to boost the chance that children will learn the intended content (Anderson et al., 2001; Fisch & Truglio, 2000a). However, fewer than half of the apps in the sample provided information about their development teams in general and fewer than a third claimed to have an underlying educational curriculum. As for testing, only 24% of the apps stated they conducted tested and most of the testing was just usability testing vs. learning efficacy.

In-App Information for Parents
Considering that joint-media engagement is a positive factor in increasing learning and that parents have difficulty finding the best apps out there, it probably doesn’t hurt to have information for grown-ups on how the app could be educational and helpful for their children as well as how they could engage with their kids around the app content. Yet, a minority provided feedback about children’s performance (17%), gave suggestions on how to enrich the app’s use (17%), or offered details about educational content (14%).

Certain Age Ranges
The number of apps targeted to kids 6-8 years old took up only 5% of the sample compared to 0-5 years old (17%), and a whopping 39% specified no age range. Caregivers who are trying to find something for their child within those age ranges will have to look hard. Given that an NPD study (2012) on parental behavior around app purchases found that three-quarters of parents with kids ages 2 to 5 look for age-appropriate apps when putting in search terms, specifying such details in the app could be key to getting discovered.

Advanced Language and Literacy Skills
To become a better reader, a child must learn a number of different skills of varying complexity between birth and age eight. These range from producing basic sounds to reading fluently and comprehending what is being read. However, we found that not many apps in our sample targeted advanced language and literacy skills like writing and typing letters, reading comprehension, upper and lowercase letter knowledge, or sight words. Parents will be hard at work when searching for apps beyond the basic building blocks such as ABCs and sounds that letters make. They might have to look elsewhere to figure out how to teach the higher order skills like storytelling or self-expression.

Storybooks, Tracing, Non-storybook Narrative, and Songs
When we dug into specific activities within the apps, we found that the apps that had won awards from expert review sites like Common Sense Media and Children’s Tech Review were more likely than other apps to have storybooks or other narrative formats (56%, compared to 39% of Top 50 Paid and 29% of Top 50 Free). Tracing and songs were also not as frequently found in the apps vs. games, puzzles, and quizzes. Having more narrative doesn’t necessarily lead to better educational outcomes. According to “A Capacity Model of Children’s Comprehension” (2010), Fisch theorizes that when the narrative content is deeply entwined with the educational content, it could lead to deeper comprehension of the educational content. However, if the educational content is tangential to the story, learning may suffer.

Special Features like Recording, Photos, Looping, Translation, Dictionaries and Printing
Of the many features we looked for within the apps, recording, taking and storing of photos, looping, translation, dictionaries, and printing were not so present. Only 12% of the apps had recording capabilities, compared to 89% having narration and 45%, hotspots. Other more common functions were animation (92%), book narration, and rewards. Similar to narrative, research found that hotspots that were not tied with the rest of the educational content caused distractions (Takacs et al., 2015).

Familiar Characters
Research has found that having an engaging, recognizable character in educational television media could increase learning for a child (Calvert et al., 2014). We decided to check if the learning apps in our sample had a recognizable character. About 21% had someone like Elmo or a Mickey Mouse guiding the child through the app experience. Though not every app has the opportunity to feature Elmo or Mickey Mouse, the just quoted research does indicate that learning occurs when the character is similar to the child (gender, favorite activities) and when the behavior is personalized (speaking to a child, saying child’s name).

Multiple Accounts & Customization
We looked at various forms of customization options within each app and found that the ability to set the overall level of difficulty for a user (also known as “leveling”) was pretty rare with only 17% having that feature. Multiple accounts was also hard to find with only 24% of the apps containing the feature. Though there isn’t much research that indicate having these functions increase learning, it may be helpful to have multiple accounts for those families with more than one child in the family. Furthermore, customization and having the app suited towards the child’s learning needs in a variety of ways is always a benefit to learning.

Non-English
Shockingly, a mere 1.2% of the apps had other languages along with English (but without Spanish). And only about 15.3% had English, Spanish and other languages. This is somewhat disappointing since apps and other interactive media have particular attributes that could be leveraged for second language learning. These media have the ability to portray multiple forms of information at the same time—such as text on-screen, audio narration of text, and images—in addition to including the same information in multiple languages (August, 2012 as cited in Vaala, 2012). This potential is especially promising given the high documented rates of cell phone and tablet ownership and use among Hispanic families in particular, including those where English is not the primary language (Rainie, 2012; Zickuhr & Smith, 2012). Many Hispanic families report strong perceptions of the educational potential of media, including apps, for their children’s learning (Lee & Barron, 2015; Levinson, 2014).

Multiple Ethnicities
Having mentioned earlier that seeing characters that are similar to themselves is helpful for children’s learning and engagement, it’s interesting to see that just 27% of the apps in the sample contain multiple ethnicities. The majority of the apps (53%) had non-human characters potentially to avoid issues like cultural appropriation or mislabeling of characters. However, it is reasonable to expect that kids would also benefit from seeing diverse characters and those that are similar to themselves in the apps (Clark, 2008).

Above we capture just the few and far in between qualities we discovered in this jungle of apps. There are probably many more that aren’t as represented but equally as important to the learning experience of the child. It is through further additional research and evaluation could we uncover these rare birds.

Read the full study here.

Photo: Shutterstock

Today, New America and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop announce the release of Integrating Technology in Early Literacy, an interactive map showing more than 30 parenting and early education programs across the country that are embedding new technologies in their efforts to support language development and early literacy.

The map gives users the ability to search and browse for programs that are experimenting with new tools (such as text messaging, apps, remote chat, and video recordings) to augment existing initiatives or catalyze new ones. Information on the map, derives from a year-long canvassing effort that combined online survey instruments with in-depth interviews and analysis of published research. Results are published using Atlas, a data-analysis tool with a geographic interface developed by New America’s Education Policy Program that is free and open for public use. To learn more about how to use the map, watch this instructional video.

Examples of programs on the map include text-messaging programs such as Ready4K in San Francisco that deliver learning tips to parents of young children; home-visiting programs that use video playback and remote coaching to support new parents; school programs such as TutorMate that enables reading tutors to interact with children in online shared reading spaces, and library-based programs such as Cortez Public Library’s “Read to Me” program in Colorado that integrates video clips, in-person storytimes and puppets to engage families in early literacy activities.

The map is designed to put a focus on the need to conduct research on what works; programs can be sorted by four levels of “evidence of impact,” with eight programs hitting the “strong” level, which features randomized controlled trials to determine effectiveness, and eleven programs at the “developing” level, which features programs undergoing research or without documented evidence.

In 2016, New America and the Cooney Center will hold a summer conference to help organizations, communities, and state leaders chart their strategies and prioritize approaches for engaging with families and early educators effectively using digital-age tools. The convening will also build new frameworks for recognizing the implications of digital tools on early childhood policy and research agendas in the latter half of the 2010s.

Funding for InTEL and the summer conference comes from the Joyce Foundation. Early funding for the project came from the Alliance for Early Success and the Pritzker Children’s Initiative.

Today, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and New America are releasing a report of our recent market scan and content analysis of language- and literacy-focused apps for young children. The report, Getting a Read on the App Stores, presents our key findings regarding the characteristics in the apps’ in-store descriptions as well as various features within their actual content.

On a personal level, the release of this report is also a poignant milestone. I have been conducting research on various intersections of youth, families, and media for nearly ten years now, yet this study is of particular importance to me. Just this August, in the course of leading this research, I became a parent. With the birth of my first child I gained a critical new stake in the very subject I was investigating: the availability, promotion, and features of apps marketed as “educational” for children birth through age 8.

Photo: Sarah Vaala

During a recent airplane trip I discovered that my 4-month-old daughter, Claire, is already entertained and even soothed by my iPhone. To my relief (and that of my fellow passengers) she immediately quieted down as she gazed at the photos in my phone’s gallery (which, of course, were mostly of her). But my relief was mixed with some apprehension. Claire will grow up with screens all around her. Increasingly, they will be part of her daily life, even part of her education. Did I really want to introduce them into her world so soon? How would I determine the optimal “media diet” for her—finding the best products and balancing the appropriate time and contexts of her screen media use with her constant desire to use them?

As a parent reviewing the findings from our app scan I have similarly mixed feelings. On one hand, there is cause to be optimistic. We encountered no shortage of language- and literacy-focused mobile apps for young children. They are among the top promoted apps in app stores: in our study they comprised 34% of all Top 50 Paid educational apps and 29% of Top 50 Free educational apps across popular app stores (Apple’s App Store, Amazon, and GooglePlay). Many are also given high marks by expert review sites like Common Sense Media, Parent’s Choice, and Children’s Technology Review. In the aggregate, young children’s language and literacy apps incorporate diverse activities (see figure below) and innovative features like the ability for children to integrate their own voices and images within the app.

Types of activities found in apps

Percent of apps that mention a guiding curriculum

And yet the task facing parents and educators searching for high quality language and literacy apps is a daunting one. App stores lack policies that could structure the information given in app descriptions or set standards for content or development characteristics necessary for apps to be classified as “educational.” What has resulted from the lack of such policies is the substantial variability we encountered in our study—variability in the information consumers are given about apps before deciding whether or not to purchase them, as well as in the information and features present in the apps themselves. In fact, the sheer amount of information in descriptions reflected a wide range; the length of descriptions in our sample varied from 13 to over 1,000 words. Key pieces of information that could guide consumers’ decision-making were spotty as well. Nearly 40% of the app descriptions we looked at did not give a target age-range or developmental stage of the children for whom the content was appropriate, using terms like “for kids” instead. As shown in the figure below, relatively few descriptions mentioned an underlying educational curriculum, one of the benchmarks of educational quality we looked for in our sample.

These examples illustrate a compelling overarching message from our findings: as consumers, the onus is on us to do our homework when searching for high quality language and literacy apps for our children. They are out there. What are lacking are guideposts to direct us towards them and away from those lacking educational value. As such, our team arrived at several suggested strategies to offer parents and educators who are searching for language- and literacy-focused mobile apps for young children:

1. Search for information about apps through different means and sources. Our findings showed an interesting pattern: consumers will find different apps depending on where they search for them. Those that we found among the Top 50 educational lists in app stores were largely not the same apps given accolades by expert review sites. Furthermore, we found different types of parent-directed information and app content features among the apps based on whether they were Top 50 Paid, Top 50 Free, or expert-awarded apps. We encourage consumers to cross-reference apps of interest across different app stores and review sites, and to also look for greater detail within associated producer websites.
2. Give voice to frustrations and great finds. We found that websites associated with apps as well as the apps themselves often contained email links to contact the developers (“contact us” links). In order to effect change in the marketplace or reinforce desirable attributes, parents and educators should make use of these opportunities to send their feedback. Developers want to sell their apps, and user feedback would be a useful tool for helping them ensure that their offerings reflect market demands. We should also voice stipulations that the app stores we patronize better serve our needs. If we do not demand standards-based categorization of children’s apps or more (and more consistent) information about them then we will be stuck with the status quo.

As we prepare to release Getting a Read on the App Stores this week, I do so as both an inspired researcher and a concerned parent. As a researcher, I am intrigued by the gaps in our collective understanding that the report has surfaced. Already, our team at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and New America is planning new investigations of the attributes within children’s educational apps and the guidance surrounding their use in order to fill these gaps for developers and consumers. As a parent, I am approaching this work with added urgency. After all, it’s up to me to locate the best apps for Claire.