What the APA’s New Report on EdTech Means for How Kids Use Screens at Home
My daughter was doing a math app on her tablet last Thursday, and I was doing the thing I always do: watching her from the kitchen, half distracted by dinner, half fascinated by the way she poked at the screen. The app was supposed to be about fractions. She had to slice a pizza and drag the slices into different boxes. It was bright, bouncy, and full of cartoon voices cheering her on every time she got one right. Then she made a mistake. The screen didn’t show correct answers or explain. It just said “Not quite!” and gave her more pizza to slice, faster, with a timer that made her anxious.
She threw her hands up. “I don’t get it,” she said.
I told her to take a break. We closed the tablet and did the rest of her math homework with paper and a pair of scissors. She cut a piece of toast into quarters and finally got it when I asked which piece was bigger. It wasn’t about the app being bad, exactly. It was that the app was more interested in keeping her engaged than in helping her understand.
That afternoon, I read an APA expert paper on edtech that a friend who teaches psych had forwarded me. The American Psychological Association’s report on educational technology has been floating around school-parent newsletters, and I’d meant to read it for a while. It turns out it’s not the kind of document that tells you “screens are evil” or “screens are great.” It’s more subtle. The paper looks at what research actually says about whether these tools help kids learn, and it found something that matched what happened at my kitchen table.
The core message, as I understood it, is that educational technology works best when it’s used to support active learning, not passive consumption. That sounds like a parenting buzzword, but let me explain what it looked like in my daughter’s case. The math app was active in the sense that she was tapping and dragging. But the thinking was shallow. She was guessing patterns, trying to keep up with the timer, not reasoning about why one half is bigger than a third. The paper calls this the difference between “technologically rich” engagement and “learning-rich” engagement. Just because a kid is interacting with a screen doesn’t mean they’re interacting with ideas.
Another thing in the APA paper that stood out: edtech can widen achievement gaps. Kids who have parental involvement, a calm home environment, and good internet access get more benefit from these tools than kids who don’t. That hit me because my daughter is lucky enough to have me watching her. But many kids are handed a tablet and left alone. The report suggests that the human context around the screen matters more than the screen itself. A kid will learn more from a boring worksheet with a parent sitting next to them than from the flashiest app when they’re isolated.
That doesn’t mean I’m tossing the tablet in the trash. Honestly, it would be impossible. My daughter’s school sends homework through a portal, and some of her reading assignments are digital. The paper acknowledges that edtech is here to stay. But it gave me a vocabulary for making better decisions about which apps to allow and which ones to quietly delete.
Here are a few things I’ve started doing since reading it, and I think they’re practical enough to try without turning your house into a screen-free monastery.
First, I ask a question before any new app is downloaded: Does this app make my child explain something, build something, or create something? If the answer is no—if it’s just a drill disguised as a game—then I’m skeptical. A good example is the difference between a flashcard app that gives stars and a coding app where the child has to sequence commands to make a character move. The latter requires actual problem-solving. The former just requires recalling facts, which can be done with real flashcards just as well.
Second, I try to do a “co-use” session once a week. That’s a phrase from the APA paper. Instead of leaving her alone with the tablet, I sit down with her for ten minutes and ask her to teach me what she’s doing. The paper says learning is deeper when kids are asked to explain to someone else. So I say, “Okay, show me how this works. Why did you put that there?” And she starts explaining, and I pretend to be a little confused, and she has to use her own words. That process—not the app—is where the learning actually happens.
Third, I pay attention to how the app handles mistakes. This was a big one from the paper. Many apps use positive feedback loops that reward any attempt, even a wrong one, just to keep kids on the screen. The APA report recommends looking for tools that give specific, corrective feedback—something that tells the child what they missed and how to fix it. If an app just says “good job” after every answer, or pushes the kid to try again without explaining, it’s a copycat app, not a learning app.
I’ve also set a simple rule that all screen time in our house has a visible endpoint. No endless swiping. That means the tablet goes back in the drawer after 30 minutes, or after one episode, or after one round of the creation-based game. The paper mentions how important it is for children to experience a natural break in digital activities so they can transition to physical play or face-to-face conversation. It sounds small, but setting a timer has helped more than any parental control app I’ve tried.
The thing that has changed the most, though, is the balance. For every 20 minutes of an educational app, I try to give at least 20 minutes of something physical or social. It doesn’t have to be organized. It can be building LEGOs, drawing a comic, or helping me sort laundry. The research in the APA paper is pretty clear that too much screen time—even educational screen time—is associated with lower attention spans and poorer sleep if it replaces active, embodied play. So I’ve started thinking of edtech as one ingredient in a meal, not the entrée.
My daughter still loves her tablet. She’ll beg to do the math app, and I haven’t deleted it. But the other night, she did fractions with actual plastic slices of pizza from her play kitchen, and she said, “That’s a whole and a half. The app doesn’t show you the pieces like this.” She was right. The app gave her a symbol; the physical slices gave her a mental image. The paper calls that “concrete learning.” I call it dinner, but it worked.
I’m still figuring out how to be a good media guide for her. Some days I let her watch a cartoon longer than I planned because I’m exhausted. Other days I feel like I’m too strict. The APA expert paper didn’t hand me a perfect answer. But it gave me a useful lens: technology is not a tutor, and it’s not a babysitter. It’s a material that a kid uses, just like clay or crayons. The kid shapes it more than it shapes them. I just have to be around enough to help them hold the scissors.
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