Creating Tools to Sustain Engagement with Digital Media

Research across disciplines shows that engagement is key ingredient for learning to occur. However, in prior intervention studies, we have observed a rapid drop-off in engagement after the first week, as measured by time using the provided educational digital media resources. This poster highlights the creation of an Android app to deliver educational content, both games and videos, to young children in a way that is comparable to the way they would naturally engage with these resources, while simultaneously allowing researchers both to promote access to all content and to track children’s usage. In the current study with 71 low-income children, we used this app to stagger the release of video content, while allowing children free access to game content. We analyzed children’s usage data and found that, on average, children’s engagement with the digital games demonstrated a rapid, precipitous drop after an initial very high rate of engagement. However, their engagement with the videos did not decrease substantially by the end of the study: initial engagement with the video content was much lower than the games and did drop after the first week, but the remaining weeks did not follow a clear pattern and remained substantively the same. In addition, in the final two weeks, children engaged with the video content to a greater extent than the games. Staggered presentation of digital material thus does seem to sustain children’s engagement with the resources. Results are discussed in terms of the importance of sustained engagement for learning outcomes.