Selecting educational apps for preschool children: How useful are website app rating systems?

In the present paper, we assess whether website rating systems are useful for selecting educational apps for preschool age children. We selected the 10 highest scoring and 10 lowest scoring apps for 2–4-year-olds from two widely used websites (Good App Guide; Common Sense Media). Apps rated highly by the two websites had a higher educational potential as assessed by a validated questionnaire for evaluating the educational potential of apps and were more likely to include a learning goal and feedback compared to low scoring apps. However, high scoring apps scored on average just 9/20 for indicators of educational potential, and both high and low scoring apps had poor language quality as determined by psycholinguistic and construction type analyses. We argue that website rating systems should also include quality of feedback, adjustable content, social interactions, storyline and a more fine-grained analysis of language in their assessments.

Practitioner notes

What is already known about this topic

• Appropriately designed apps for preschool age children have the potential to teach early school readiness skills.
• Selecting high quality educational apps for preschool age children is challenging.
• The children's app marketplace is currently unregulated.

What this paper adds

• We assess whether two leading app rating websites are useful for selecting educational apps for preschool age children.
• Children's apps rated highly by two app website rating systems had a higher educational potential than low rated apps as measured by a research informed app evaluation tool.
• In-depth analysis of the language in apps shows that highly rated children's apps on app rating websites may not enrich a child's early language environment.

Implications for practice and/or policy

• Children's app rating website assessments should include potential for feedback, language, adjustable content, storyline and social interactions.
• Policy should be implemented for app ratings in the app stores or on website app rating systems.

     

Land education: Indigenous,post-colonial,and decolonizing perspectives on place and environmental education research

This editorial introduces a special issue of Environmental Education Research titled ‘Land education: Indigenous, post-colonial, and decolonizing perspectives on place and environmental education research.’ The editorial begins with an overview of each of the nine articles in the issue and their contributions to land and environmental education, before outlining features of land education in more detail. ‘Key considerations’ of land education are discussed, including: Land and settler colonialism, Land and Indigenous cosmologies, Land and Indigenous agency and resistance, and The significance of naming. The editorial engages the question ‘Why land education?’ by drawing distinctions between land education and current forms of place-based education. It closes with a discussion of modes and methods of land education research.     

Unforgetting Place in Urban Education through Creative Participatory Visual Methods

In this article, Eve Tuck and Sefanit Habtom first consider the consequences of the erasure of the importance of place in the field of urban education and then describe a new youth participatory action research project in Toronto called Making Sense of Movements (MSOM). MSOM is a youth participatory visual research project that engages Black and Indigenous youth in thinking about the influence of social movements such as Black Lives Matter and Idle No More in their relationships to Toronto as a place, and also in their postsecondary planning.     

Bilingual poetry: expanding the cognitive and cultural dimensions of children's learning

Stories and poetry have long been considered a resource for the language and literacy development of bilingual children, particularly if they can work with texts in both mother tongue and English. This paper demonstrates that bilingual learning is also beneficial for second and third‐generation children whose English is often stronger than their mother tongue. Presenting data from an action research project in East London primary schools, we show how children investigated metaphor and cultural content in a Bengali lullaby, clarifying concepts through dialogue with their parents. Comparison with a lullaby in English from North America generated additional ideas concerning different cultural values. The learning process enabled children to use their bilingual skills and draw on different aspects of their bicultural identities. Finally, we explain how bilingual poetry can be used to stimulate learning in a multilingual classroom context, through the example of a whole‐class lesson based around Bengali and English lullabies.     

Women,Education and Social Mobility in Britain during the Long 1970s

ABSTRACT

Through analysis of oral history interviews and quantitative source material, this article offers a gendered model of social mobility in the post-war decades. It argues that women born between the late 1930s and early 1950s achieved social mobility through entering post-secondary education after a period of employment, followed by occupational movement into the welfare professions. Women’s mobility primarily occurred in the long 1970s, facilitated by the Wilson government’s investment in the welfare state and its expansion of further education and creation of the polytechnics. This challenges the predominantly masculinised trope of the grammar school as the driver of post-war mobility.     

The struggle to make sense of doctoral study

Semi-structured, qualitative interviews conducted with an ethno-culturally diverse group of 27 doctoral students in one Canadian university department produced narratives that often featured stories of stress and struggle. Two interrelated themes emerging from the data are highlighted here: surviving financially and dealing with divisions and diversity. The context is one where student bodies have become more diverse and the academic labour market less geared to full-time tenured positions. We argue that the commonplace notion that doctoral study means elite students being socialized into academic futures de-emphasizes the material conditions and interpersonal tensions that actually characterize everyday student life.     

‘Testing,testing, testing… can you hear me?’

This article draws on material that formed part of a project entitled ‘Sustaining Pupils’ Progress at Year 3'¹. One area that emerged as significant early in the project was the practice and the place of assessment. The project found a high increase in testing and other forms of assessment during Year 3 designed in part to facilitate progress. This article poses the question of whether we can learn from hearing what pupils have to say about their experience of assessment and concludes that, given the language with which to discuss and understand the processes they experience, children's views can indeed be of value as schools focus on ways to sustain learning