There’s a growing backlash to educational technology in the classroom, as I described in my story co-published with The New York Times in March. To dig deeper into the topic, I led a Hechinger Report webinar last week on screen time in the early grades. It featured Jill Anderson, a third-grade teacher in New York, and Miriam Kendall, a parent and head of the Illinois-based group Screen Sense Evanston.
After initially embracing devices, Anderson has cut down on tech in her own classroom. Devices are “taking the social element out of learning, which I think is so important,” she said. “If we’re going to play a math game, why not play it with another child and learn to make eye contact and how to act when you win or lose?”
She added: “I almost feel this responsibility to intentionally have less tech here to make sure that they don’t have an excessive amount in general.”
Kendall said she worries about the “gamification” of learning — educational apps using reward systems to capture children’s attention. “I think we are training our kids’ brains that learning is like a video game,” she said.
We got such a huge response from webinar participants — more than 700 of you signed up! — and didn’t have a chance to answer every question. So I wanted to tackle some of those questions here:
After Anderson said that she noticed low-income students seem to have more screen time than more affluent students, a participant asked if there were any studies showing this to be true. Indeed, some studies have found this to be the case: One pre-pandemic study found lower-income children ages 0-8 spent more time on screens than middle- or higher-income children. A 2022 study found children whose families are higher income spend less time on screens, with the exception of video chats.
Another participant asked if screen time has displaced play and learning life skills for young children. Studies have found that excess screen time is associated with lowered executive functioning. Other researchers have found that more screen time for toddlers was associated with less time playing with other children.
One participant asked if literacy skills are dropping due to screen time because children are not reading as many books, and another asked if there is data connecting speech problems in young children to screen use. Literacy rates have been dropping for years, and while some researchers suspect screen time is a part of that trend, it’s not the sole cause. Poor reading instruction and lost learning time during the pandemic are among other potential reasons. As for speech, therapy referrals and speech delay diagnoses increased during and after the pandemic. A 2023 study found children who had more screen time at age one were more likely to have communication-related delays at ages 2 and 4.
My recent story offers more detail on ed tech use in the early years, and we wrote a piece capturing reader response — pro and con — to the original story.
I also filmed a short video of Anderson’s classroom and the full webinar can be viewed on YouTube.
This story about screen time was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
The post Screen time in the early grades: a parent and teacher weigh in appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
