Count the amount of applications that call themselves “educational” in the children’s area of any app store. There are a lot of them. The phrase can be found in alphabet games, coloring applications, puzzles that sort numbers, vocabulary builders, animal sound players, and apps that seem to be made up nearly solely of cartoon creatures who make sounds when tapped. They target kids between the ages of two and five, range in price from free to several dollars a month for a subscription, and use language that emphasizes developmental rigor in their ads, such as “builds early literacy,” “develops critical thinking,” and “STEM-aligned curriculum.” Nearly none of them have had their veracity objectively assessed.
In the app market, the phrase “educational” has no set definition. As a marketing term that doesn’t need to be verified or substantiated before being presented to parents, a developer can refer to their product as educational in the same way that they can refer to it as pleasant or colorful. Apple and Google do not support pedagogical claims when they offer an app in the Education category. They acknowledge that the app was submitted to that category by the developer. The parent reading the lists is solely responsible for figuring out what “educational” genuinely means in each particular situation.
This is significant because the word’s business rationale is so compelling that it is used carelessly. When a child’s screen time is deemed educational, parents are more inclined to let it. They are more prepared to pay for it. Since they have already determined that it is productive time, they are less likely to keep a tight eye on it. Even when the app’s actual content doesn’t meet a developmental researcher’s most fundamental standards for meaningful learning, the title “educational” serves as a parental anxiety reducer.
Researchers that examine how kids use digital media have found a fairly distinct set of characteristics that differentiate apart apps that can actually teach from those that only appear to do so. It is crucial that the child actively participate in the activity by doing something that calls for real thought as opposed to merely tapping to go on. meaningful information that isn’t just abstract but also relates to knowledge in the real world. Social contact opportunities, preferably with a caregiver in attendance. and an iterative task that adapts to the child’s proven knowledge. These criteria have long been published by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and other comparable research organizations. Since meeting criteria is costly and the label functions well without them, the commercial app market has mostly disregarded them.
One of the more depressing results in this field of study is the transfer deficit. It has been shown that young children, especially those under three, have trouble applying what they have learned on a screen to real-world situations. Even if a toddler can tap the right letter on an app, they might not be able to identify or name it in a book or on a cereal box. The screen interaction creates a behavioral pattern that functions inside the particular format of the app, but the cognitive architecture needed to generalize that learning to new situations develops in different ways. For this reason, the World Health Organization advises against screen time for children under the age of two, and studies regularly show that real-world play and caregiver interaction result in better early learning results than screen-based alternatives.
One of the first significant warning instances of educational claims encountering regulatory resistance was the Baby Einstein series of videos and later applications marketed to parents of infants and toddlers. Disney later paid refunds after the Federal Trade Commission received complaints about the promotion after study revealed no developmental benefit and some indications of harm from the videos. The episode demonstrated how slowly accountability advances in this area and established a model for how the gap between “educational” marketing and real instructional material manifests itself. In 1997, Baby Einstein was introduced. Years later, the FTC filed complaints. Since then, the fundamental marketing strategy has persisted throughout the app business.
