How to Tell If an Educational App Is Actually Helping Your Child
The tablet was sitting on the kitchen table, glowing softly, and my son Leo, age seven, was supposed to be practicing his reading. Instead, he was tapping the screen in a rhythm that didn’t match the words. The app narrated a story, highlighted each sentence, and then asked multiple-choice questions. Leo wasn’t looking at the words. He was just watching the pictures, tapping the largest button, and waiting for the confetti burst that meant he’d earned another star.
I asked him, “What is the story about?”
He shrugged. “The dog runs.”
“And why does the dog run?”
“Because you press the button.”
That answer stopped me. The app had been marketed as “adaptive” and “research-based.” It had a fancy dashboard for parents, a progress map, and a pet dragon that grew bigger with each correct answer. But Leo had figured out the real game: don’t bother reading, just tap. The dragon was his reward, and the story was just the obstacle.
I wasn’t surprised entirely. I’m a teacher, so I’ve seen the same thing in my classroom. Kids sitting at computers, smiling at the screen, but when I ask them to explain what they just learned, they give me a blank stare. Educational technology has a shiny surface, but underneath, it’s often just a gussied-up worksheet with brighter colors and a timer.
A few weeks after the kitchen table incident, I came across an expert paper from the American Psychological Association, written by a group of researchers who study children and digital media. It wasn’t a list of scary warnings. It was more of a practical guide for parents and educators, asking basic questions about what makes an educational app actually educational. The main idea, distilled, was that the best edtech encourages thinking, not just tapping. And that simple phrase—“think versus tap”—became my new filter.
The APA paper pointed out that many apps mistake glitz for engagement. A child can be fully engaged—eyes wide, finger tapping away—but learning nothing. True educational apps should put the child in a state where they have to plan, infer, or solve a small problem. That’s called productive struggle. Leo’s reading app, for instance, solved the problem for him. It read the sentence aloud, highlighted the words in a perfect swoosh, and then asked a question that was essentially just “what did you see in the picture?” There was no reason for him to actually decode the text. The app was doing the reading. Leo was just along for the ride.
So I started going back through the apps on his tablet, one by one, with the “think versus tap” rule in mind. Some apps were fine. A spelling game that showed a word and then removed a letter, forcing Leo to pick the missing one? That took memory and attention. A math app that gave him three numbers and asked him to make a fact family? That took reasoning. But the heavily animated ones, the ones with dance parties after every answer, those were the ones he loved and was learning the least from. He wasn’t loving the thinking. He was loving the party.
I also realized that the parent-facing features could be misleading. The progress reports didn’t show whether Leo was guessing or truly solving. They showed streaks and trophies. So I changed how we use them.
The first change was a time limit. Not just for health reasons, but for cognitive ones. The APA paper noted that after about twenty minutes, the quality of attention drops, and kids start clicking just to keep the screen alive. So now Leo gets fifteen minutes on an app, then he closes it and talks to me about what he did. I ask a very specific question: “What was hard today?” If he says “nothing,” that app doesn’t come back the next day. If he grumbles and gives me a fuzzy answer like “the word with the silent e,” that’s gold. That means the app actually challenged him.
The second change was sitting with him. Not every day, but often enough. I’d watch how he responded to a wrong answer. A good app should handle mistakes without a dramatic error buzz. The best ones let you try again or show you a hint that requires you to read more carefully. The worst ones show a sad face and then immediately give the right answer, which teaches nothing except that failure is fast and forgettable. I started rewiring my own response too. When Leo got something wrong, I’d say, “Good, now we know. Let’s figure out why.” That phrase, repeated often enough, helped him stop panicking about the star count and start noticing the logic.
The third change was to turn off the sound. Many educational apps have distracting background music and voiceover prompts that do the thinking for the child. With the sound off, the text becomes the main event. In one of Leo’s reading apps, the narrator’s voice was essentially an audio book, and he was just following along like it was a movie. Muting it forced him to actually interpret the words. The app wasn’t designed for that, and the interface got a little awkward, but it worked. He slowed down. He misread a few words. Then he guessed a little less.
I mentioned this to a few other parents at pickup, and one said, “So you’re saying all those apps are a scam?” Not exactly. I think there’s a place for edtech, even in the early years. But the responsibility for making it work falls heavily on the adult who hands over the tablet. The APA paper’s takeaway wasn’t “don’t use technology.” It was more like, “Don’t mistake activity for learning.” That applies to all of us, in any context. We see a kid happily tapping, and we think, Great, they’re learning. But sometimes they’re just tapping. Sometimes we’re just giving them a digital pacifier that happens to be shaped like an educational game.
The most helpful thing the paper gave me was a mental framework for evaluation. When I’m looking at a new app, either for Leo or for my students, I ask three quick questions: Is the child actively constructing something—a sentence, a strategy, a prediction? Or are they merely reacting to prompts? Is the visual feedback necessary to the learning, or is it just decorative? And where does the child make mistakes? A good app will use mistakes as a branching point, not a dead end.
I’m not saying I have the perfect system. Last week, Leo found his way to a geography app that’s just a quiz with a spinning globe. It’s not deep. He loves it because the globe is hypnotic. I let him keep it, but I don’t count it as screen time for learning. It’s more like a virtual sticker book. And that’s okay, as long as we’re honest about what it is.
The other day, Leo finished a math app and came to find me. “It was hard,” he said. “The app kept giving me these problems with missing signs, so I had to figure out if it was plus or minus before I could even answer.” He was annoyed. His little eyebrows were knitted together. Then he said, “Can I do another one?” That was the moment. That annoyance was the sign of an active mind. The app had made him think, and he still wanted more.
We still have the reading app that started this whole thing. Leo opens it sometimes, but now he skips the story parts and goes straight to the bonus games, which are just matching pairs. I think I’ll remove it soon. He’ll complain for a minute, but then he’ll find something else—maybe a book with an actual dog in it, one he has to read himself. We’re not there yet. We’re still negotiating what “learning” means when a screen is involved. But I’m asking better questions now, and so is he. That’s a start.
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