Pre-School children’s experiences with touchscreens

From the existing body of literature on children using touchscreen technologies, the majority of these experiences appear to be in the home environment. However, children are now beginning to use a range of touchscreens in their early year’s settings and touchscreens have become an additional tool on which to play and learn. Whilst Early Years practitioners are sharing technological experiences with young children, there remains no formal support on how to effectively support children using technology.

Since recognising this gap in research and literature, I am writing a PhD focusing on the experiences two to four-year-old children have using touchscreens and how these experiences can support a social learning environment where children benefit from a range of interactions with others. As a result of observing these interactions, I aim to begin to reduce the gap of appropriate touchscreen use, combining data from surveys, interviews with early years practitioners and observations of children’s experiences to produce guidelines for each early years setting involved with the aim of establishing good practice using touchscreen technology.

This ‘In Brief’ Article was first published in the August 2015 Edition of UKEdMagazine. You can freely read the magazine online by clicking here.

@ShannonLudgate Nuneaton, Warwickshire – PhD Student at Birmingham City University

You need to Login or Register to bookmark/favorite this content.