What the APA Expert Paper on Edtech Actually Says About Kids and Screens
The first time I noticed it, I wasn’t really looking. It was a Tuesday afternoon, and my third graders were spread out across the room, each one perched in front of a tablet. The official term was “personalized learning,” but what I saw was twenty-four small heads tilted toward glowing screens, each face lit up in a way that reminded me of moths at a porch light. I walked past Marcus, who was supposed to be doing a reading comprehension lesson. He was, from the look of it, staring at the same paragraph for four minutes. Not reading. Just staring.
I leaned in. “What’s the main idea here?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. The app doesn’t tell me until I click.”
I wanted to tell him to focus, to reread, to do anything other than wait for the magic answer button. But I had just finished reading a summary of a major report from the American Psychological Association—an expert paper on edtech—and something in it made me stop. The report wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t “screens are destroying our kids” or “technology is the future, get on board.” It was a careful, research-heavy review of how children actually learn when digital tools are involved, and one line kept nagging at me: The type of interaction matters more than the amount of time.
I had seen that in real time, right in front of me. Marcus wasn’t learning because the app was giving him a multiple-choice question every few seconds. It was giving him a kind of simulated busywork, a loop of micro-tasks that kept his finger moving but not his mind. The APA report said that edtech works best when it requires active thinking, when kids have to explain their reasoning, and when a capable adult or peer is around to ask questions. It wasn’t about the tablet being good or bad. It was about what the tablet was actually doing to his attention.
That afternoon, I made some changes. They weren’t big, and they weren’t flashy, but they came directly from that report.
First, I banned the independent-drill-app station. You know the ones: the math games with digital tickets and confetti explosions, where kids advance by tapping the right answer quickly. The APA paper pointed to research showing that these can actually reduce transfer of learning. Kids get better at answering the app’s questions, but they don’t get better at the underlying skill when it’s presented in a different format. So I turned off the confetti. I made a rule: any app used in my room has to have a “think out loud” moment attached. When a kid finishes a problem, they have to explain to their partner how they got the answer. If they can’t say it, they go back and try again.
That sounds simple, but the reaction of the kids was interesting. The first few days, they complained. “Can’t I just do the next one?” they asked. But the very act of talking about their thinking, out loud, to another person, shifted something. The classroom got noisier, but it was a different kind of noise—less like a room full of kids staring into separate worlds and more like a room full of kids arguing about math strategies. The report called this “scaffolding and social co-construction of knowledge.” I just called it “turn and tell your partner.”
The second thing I did was less obvious. I stopped assigning technology for homework. The APA paper reviewed evidence about the “homework gap” and noted something else: kids benefit from having a parent or caregiver nearby when they’re using educational technology. Not explaining everything, but just being present and occasionally asking, “What did you learn?” That works far better than handing a child a tablet while you cook dinner. So I started sending home a short note instead: “Ask your child to explain one new fact they learned about science today. That’s it.”
The third change was the hardest because it involved me. I had to stop treating screens as babysitters in the classroom. I realized that when I gave kids a device to “keep them busy” during transitions or seatwork, I was modeling the exact behavior the APA report warned against: using technology as a passive time-filler. I started putting the tablets away when they weren’t directly tied to a lesson goal. If the app wasn’t going to get us further than a worksheet would, I’d just use the worksheet. Sometimes the worksheet won.
One morning, a boy named David came in with something he’d found on his sister’s phone—a short video of a volcano erupting, with explosions and sound effects. He was thrilled. “Can I watch this for science?” he asked. My first instinct was to say no, because it wasn’t part of the curriculum. But then I remembered another part of the APA paper: content matters. A high-quality video about a natural phenomenon can build background knowledge in a way that text can’t, especially for kids who struggle with reading. So I said yes, but with a condition. “We’ll watch it together,” I said. “And you have to pause it and tell me what’s happening at each stage.”
We sat side by side, David’s finger on the pause button. He narrated, his eyes big. “Instead of a cover just popping off,” he said, “the gas builds up and then it bursts.” He was using the language of the video, but he was also owning it. He wasn’t just watching. He was explaining. That, more than any quiet time on a classroom app, was real learning.
In the evenings, at home, my own son is nine. He takes his tablet to the den for “homework,” which sometimes includes an online reading program. I used to just let him go. Then I read the report and realized what I was missing. The APA paper stressed that parental involvement, even just sitting nearby and occasionally asking a question, is strongly associated with better outcomes. Now I sit on the couch next to him, reading my own book. He knows I’m there. Every so often, he’ll hold up the screen and show me something, and I’ll say, “What did you figure out?” and he’ll tell me. Those twenty-second conversations might not seem like much, but they’re the only moments in his day where he actually has to put what he’s learning into his own words.
I’m not claiming that I’ve solved edtech, or that the APA paper gave me a perfect formula. I still let Marcus play the drill game sometimes, because honestly, it’s better than staring at a blank page on a Friday afternoon. I still get frustrated when a video takes longer to load than the attention span of a nine-year-old. But I’m more aware now. The expert paper made me realize that the question isn’t “Is technology good or bad?” It’s “What are we using it for, and who is standing next to the child while they use it?”
These days, when I hand out tablets, I have a new slogan I repeat before they get started. “If the app is thinking for you,” I say, “you aren’t learning.” I don’t know where that came from, exactly, but it seems to hold. I watch for the kids who are just tapping, waiting for the next confetti burst. When I see that, I make them close the app and tell me what they’re supposed to be finding out. Sometimes they can. Sometimes they can’t. The ones who can’t are the ones who need me the most.
I’ve started sending a version of this home to parents, too. Not as a lecture. Just a paragraph in the newsletter: “When your child uses a screen for school, sit nearby. Ask them to teach you one thing. It doesn’t matter if you know the answer. The act of explaining it makes their brain work harder.”
It’s slow, and it doesn’t fix everything. But for now, it’s working better than confetti ever did.
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