As we learn more about child language development, we are curious as to how each individual child best develops the necessary skills to succeed. In today’s world, we are constantly being bombarded with technology; on average, people use apps on their devices between 194-223 days a year (Pontin et al., 2021). With the increasingly large influence of technology, we decided to investigate apps that were created to provide language and literacy instruction for children. Our goal was to synthesize existing research to create a rubric for judging the quality of educational apps. We asked what aspects of educational apps do educators find most important in choosing to use them for instruction? As well as what is the average rating of popular apps used for teaching social skills and phonics/phonological awareness instruction? To incorporate the opinions of professional educators and speech-language pathologists, as well as help support the validity of our rubric, we distributed a rubric in a survey fashion to a group of 22 teachers and speech-language pathologists. We received Institutional Review Board approval for the study before data collection began. Survey ratings for each item were averaged to create a weighted total for each item of the rubric. The validated and weighted rubric was used to evaluate the most popular 10 instructional apps available on the Apple App Store for teaching phonological awareness and social skills. Overall, our rubric was found to be valid, with educators rating each item on the rubric as important, and reliable, with an inter-rater reliability score of 62%. Educators found the quality of the design as well as technical adequacy the most important aspects of the rubric, while flexibility and autonomy were of lower priority. Most educators shared that they would use our rubric, found it easy to use, and thought it was applicable to a wide variety of educational domains. As future speech-language pathologists, we are seeing the increased rates of technology use in educational settings, and understand the importance of educational apps that are effective and will best benefit our clients. References Pontin, F., Lomax, N., Clarke, G. & Morris, M.A. (2021). Socio-demographic determinants of physical activity and app usage from smartphone data. Social Science & Medicine, 284, 114235. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114235
Authors: Melanie Weber, Alyssa McGarvey, Julia Wank
Advisor: Arnold Olszewski, PhD, CCC-SLP, Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology
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