Get That App!: Examining Parental Evaluations of Numeracy Apps

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe accessibility of mobile technologies opens a new world of possibilities for parents to support their children’s learning through game-based numeracy apps. Carefully designed numeracy apps can be effective at improving children’s foundational numeracy skills. In the absence of industry standards for quality, however, it is important to understand how parents choose numeracy apps for their children. Forty-five parents of children 3 to 6 years old completed a survey and explored four numeracy apps of varying quality and instructional supports. Parent ratings were consistent with trained coders in identification of the highest rated app. However, ratings for the three remaining apps differed from the coders’ ratings. Other factors apart from quality influenced parental ratings. For example, parents who had higher perceived math teaching confidence and those whose children used technology more often generally were more favorable in their app ratings. Overall, the study revealed strengths and challenges parents have evaluating numeracy apps.KEYWORDS: Math appsnumeracy parentstechnologyyoung children Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. No apps were chosen from the Tier 4 rating for this study because none of them met other inclusion criteria, such as being available on both Android and Apple devices and being free.