Screens, Apps, and Digital Books for Young Children - The Promise of Multimedia

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Cart

The article examines how digitization shapes young children’s learning environments, focusing on multimedia sources such as apps, digital books, and video streaming. It synthesizes a special-topic research set to describe two key directions: how changes in the learning setting affect adult-child participatory interaction, and how digital affordances reshape learning material design. Findings summarize implications for children’s language and early literacy experiences and highlight “alerts” about design quality and immediate usage for maximizing benefits.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages6

Reading Time15 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

The special topic’s scope and themes

Changes in learning environments and adult roles

Digital book reading routines and co-viewing

AERA Open January-March 2020, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 1–6 DOI: 10. 1177/2332858420901494 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© The Author(s) 2020. [http://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](http://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) Screens, Apps, and Digital Books for Young Children: The Promise of Multimedia Adriana G. Bus University of Stavanger ELTE Eötvös Loránd University Susan B. Neuman New York University Kathleen Roskos John Carroll University Just beginning to understand the potentials new technologies might bring to the learning environments of young children, we invited authors to submit articles that investigate multimedia sources and their effect on learning settings. Two main themes emerged—how digitization changes the learning environment and adult-child interaction in particular and which digital affordances enrich digital materials and how these changes affect learning. We finish with “alerts” to further explore more the hidden potentials of new technologies and how routines such as book reading might change and become more effective in some respects. Keywords: computer applications, early childhood, experimental research, instructional technologies, language comprehension/development, media, technology Introduction Thirty years into the digital era, it is now quite clear that apps, digital books, and video streaming services are game changers in the young child’s learning environment. Traditionally built games, books, and educational television programs are rapidly giving way to digital content on electronic devices, often handheld and mobile in the near environment. We are only beginning to understand what this digital shift might mean for young children’s language and early literacy development and what potentials these new technologies might bring to the learning environments of young children. In this special topic, we survey this emerging field of research in early childhood to gauge what digital resources seem to afford young children in their environments and to what effect. We invited authors to submit articles that explore to what extent digital resources can enrich young children’s learning environment. The special topic contains an eclectic set of articles that investigate a range of multimedia sources (games, books, programs) and learning settings (home, school) . Collectively, the articles focus on a relatively large sample of young children in the 4- to 6-year age range (~1,500), thus providing a rich set of observational data for examining child-screen interactions. Our reading of the set of articles leads us to a twofold set of descriptive observations relevant to the young child’s learning environment: (a) changes in the learning environment and the consequences these have for participatory interaction and (b) changes in design of learning materials as a result of digitization—that is, the affordances of the digital material. From each set, we learn more about the digital resource in the learning environment—that is, what it brings to the child’s language and early literacy experience. And we also gain insight into what is still unknown about enhanced apps, books, and programs and their potentials for improving and enriching the language learning environment of the young child. Below we briefly highlight key findings related to changes in the learning environment and digital design, recognizing that these represent but a “slice” of the rapidly growing research in this field. Based on the findings, we then summarize what we consider as “alerts” to our colleagues in the field. By this, we mean a greater attentiveness to the design quality of digital resources and their usage in the immediate learning environment to children’s benefit. Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Licens

FAQs

What two main themes does the article identify in digital learning for young children?

It highlights how digitization changes the learning environment and adult-child interaction, and which digital affordances enrich digital materials and how these changes affect learning.

What shift in learning materials is emphasized as particularly notable?

The article stresses the shift toward digital book reading, where new affordances influence book-reading routines.

How does the article relate the digital format to children’s comprehension and engagement?

It notes evidence that children can be equally emotionally engaged and comprehend comparable amounts whether stories are in print or digital, while outcomes differ when app-book affordances are included.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Cart