McGill EdTech researchers Armaghan Montazami, Heather Pearson, Gulsah Kacmaz, Run Wen, Adam Dubé and Sabrina Alam to share their recent work on educational apps.
Q: What is your research about?
A: Educational apps are popular tools for learning at school and at home, but with so many apps available teachers might be challenged to choose effective ones for learning. When teachers are perusing the app store, they might be swayed by buzzwords or attractive visuals; however, these cues don’t guarantee the educational quality of an app.
Instead, teachers should choose apps that include five benchmarks of educational quality:
- They follow a curriculum with clear learning goals.
- They are created by a development team that includes educational experts, such as teachers or researchers.
- They provide learners with feedback to help them learn from their mistakes.
- They provide scaffolding in that they support and adjust the level of challenge to help learners succeed.
- They are guided by learning theory.
To improve learning outcomes, it is important that teachers choose high-quality apps. In this study, we wanted to find out how teachers choose educational apps for their classrooms.
Q: What did you do?
A: We asked 57 teachers and student teachers to look at some app pages we fabricated. Some of the apps’ descriptions included only buzzwords, while others included one of the five educational benchmarks.
To understand how much teachers valued each app, we asked them to answer questions such as whether they would download the app, and how much they would be willing to pay.
We also used eye-tracker technology to record where participants directed their attention while they were looking at each app.
Q: What did you find?
A: Teachers preferred apps whose descriptions featured educational benchmarks over apps with buzzwords.
Teachers did not value all educational benchmarks equally; they valued scaffolding, curriculum, and development team the most, while they valued learning theory and feedback the least.
Teachers spent more time looking at each app’s text description than images.
Q: What can we learn from these findings?
A: Teachers do prefer apps that feature benchmarks of high educational quality; however, they value some benchmarks more than others. It may be worthwhile to provide teachers with training to help them understand what to look for when choosing educational apps.
App developers should consider using educational benchmarks to guide their design of apps and app pages. Apps including educational benchmarks are evidence-based and more attractive to teachers.
About the researchers
Armaghan Montazami, Heather Pearson, Gulsah Kacmaz, and Run Wen are PhD candidates in McGill’s Learning Sciences Program in the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology.
Dr. Adam Dubé is an Associate Professor of Learning Science in the McGill Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology. Dr. Dubé is the Director of the McGill Office of EdTech as well as Director of the Technology, Learning & Cognition Lab (TLC).
Dr. Sabrina Alam is a PhD graduate in Learning Sciences within the McGill Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology.
The researchers are all members of Dr. Dubé’s Technology, Learning, and Cognition (TLC) Lab at McGill University.
Citation
Montazami, A., Ann Pearson, H., Kenneth Dubé, A., Kacmaz, G., Wen, R., & Shajeen Alam, S. (2022). Why this app? How educators choose a good educational app. Computers & Education, 184, 104513.