Children’s agency and reading with story-apps: considerations of design, behavioural and social dimensions

Agency in Educational Technology: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Implications for Learning Design

Advancing learners’ agency is a key educational goal. The advent of personalized EdTech, which automatically tailor learning environments to individual learners, gives renewed relevance to the topic. EdTech researchers and practitioners are confronted with the same basic question: What is the right amount of agency to give to learners during their interactions with EdTech? This question is even more relevant for younger learners. Our aim in this paper is twofold: First, we outline and synthesize the ways in which agency is conceptualized in three key learning disciplines (philosophy, education, and psychology). We show that there are different types and levels of agency and various prerequisites for the effective exercise of agency and that these undergo developmental change. Second, we provide guiding principles for how agency can be designed for in EdTech for children. We propose an agency personalization loop in which the level of agency provided by the EdTech is assigned in an adaptive manner to strike a balance between allowing children to freely choose learning content and assigning optimal content to them. Finally, we highlight some examples from practice.

The Distance Between the "Self" and the "Other" in Children's Digital Books

This conceptual paper contributes toward our understanding of the underlying mechanisms in children’s understanding of self and the other with media. We synthesize diverse bodies of literature, concerned with children’s reading with digital and traditional (print) books, to explicate the parameters that may, in part, explain positive learning outcomes and further illuminate the patterns across various measures. We propose the “Distance Model,” which suggests that a child’s interest in a reading activity depends on its proximity to the child’s funds of identity (Esteban-Guitart and Moll, 2014). The closer the proximity, the more salient the impact on the child’s cognitive understanding and sense of belonging. The familiarity of the reading content and the relevance of the reading medium for a child’s personal life can be evoked through a number of reading strategies and design techniques, which we discuss in relation to children’s literature and the contemporary design of children’s interactive e-books. We conclude with some suggestions regarding future applications of the Distance Model in children’s media research.