Can Touch Screen Tablets be Used to Assess Cognitive and Motor Skills in Early Years Primary School Children? A Cross-Cultural Study

Assessment of cognitive and motor functions is fundamental for developmental and neuropsychological profiling. Assessments are usually conducted on an individual basis, with a trained examiner, using standardized paper and pencil tests, and can take up to an hour or more to complete, depending on the nature of the test. This makes traditional standardized assessments of child development largely unsuitable for use in low-income countries. Touch screen tablets afford the opportunity to assess cognitive functions in groups of participants, with untrained administrators, with precision recording of responses, thus automating the assessment process. In turn, this enables cognitive profiling to be conducted in contexts where access to qualified examiners and standardized assessments are rarely available. As such, touch screen assessments could provide a means of assessing child development in both low- and high-income countries, which would afford cross-cultural comparisons to be made with the same assessment tool. However, before touch screen tablet assessments can be used for cognitive profiling in low-to-high-income countries they need to be shown to provide reliable and valid measures of performance. We report the development of a new touch screen tablet assessment of basic cognitive and motor functions for use with early years primary school children in low- and high-income countries. Measures of spatial intelligence, visual attention, short-term memory, working memory, manual processing speed, and manual coordination are included as well as mathematical knowledge. To investigate if this new touch screen assessment tool can be used for cross-cultural comparisons we administered it to a sample of children (N = 283) spanning standards 1–3 in a low-income country, Malawi, and a smaller sample of children (N = 70) from first year of formal schooling from a high-income country, the UK. Split-half reliability, test-retest reliability, face validity, convergent construct validity, predictive criterion validity, and concurrent criterion validity were investigated. Results demonstrate “proof of concept” that touch screen tablet technology can provide reliable and valid psychometric measures of performance in the early years, highlighting its potential to be used in cross-cultural comparisons and research.

A Picture You Can Handle: Infants Treat Touch-Screen Images More Like Photographs than Objects

Infants actively explore their world in order to determine the different ways in which they can interact with various objects. Although research on infant perception has focused on how infants understand the differences between 2- and 3-dimensional objects, today's infants increasingly encounter 2D images with interactive qualities on smart-phone screens, tablets, and laptops. The purpose of this experiment was to examine the types of manual behaviors infants direct toward tablet images and to compare these actions to those evoked by 2D photographs or 3D when tactile feedback is controlled. Infants between the ages of 7-10 months sat on their parent's lap in front of a table with a built-in well covered by a clear, plastic sheet while the three types of displays (photographs, objects, and screen images on a tablet) were presented for 30 s each. Infants saw three examples of each type of display presented in the built-in well so that tactile feedback information from the different displays was controlled. Coders noted the proportion of trials in which infants grasped, scratched, rubbed, or patted the display. Results indicate that infants direct significantly more grasps, scratches, and rubs toward 3D objects than 2D photographs. Infants also direct more grasps to objects compared to screen images. Our data suggests that infants are treating screen images more similarly to 2D photographs than 3D objects.