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Learning on the Fingertip: The Effects of Touchscreen Learning
2020, 43(1):
60-67.
Touchscreen learning is a knowledge or skill acquisition process in which learning content is presented through touchscreen hardware and software devices, and students learn through gestural touchscreen interaction. Touchscreen learning has been a new form of learning in the current digital era. The role that touchscreen learning plays in education has attracted considerable attention from game developers, parents, school educators, policymakers, and scholars. In this article, the effectiveness, relative advantages, learning aftereffects, theoretical frameworks, and influencing factors of touchscreen learning were reviewed.
Though the basic research on touchscreen learning is still at an early stage of exploration, it provides a good starting point for an in-depth understanding of the effects of touchscreen learning. Previous work mainly focused on the effectiveness, relative advantages and learning aftereffects of touchscreen learning. The effectiveness concerned the intrinsic effect of touchscreen learning per se and was reflected by the differences in learning performance between learning by touching and various baselines, for instance, a non-learning task baseline, a chance baseline, or a pretest baseline. The relative advantages concerned the relative effect of learning by playing vs. some other non-touchscreen learning methods, for instance, traditional classroom learning, learning with mouse-based computers, learning with physical objects, or learning by watching on touchscreens. There was evidence that learning from touchscreens seemed to be stably effective. That is, touchscreen itself could provide support for learning. However, the relative advantages of touchscreen learning were not robust. With respect to the learning aftereffects, touchscreen learning helped to improve learning motivation, but it did not steadily promote knowledge retention, knowledge understanding, and transfer of learning from 2D to 3D.
Different theoretical frameworks can be used to predict and explain the educational roles of touchscreen learning. Embodied cognition theory (ECT) provides a positive theoretical framework for understanding the potential pedagogic value of embodied interactivity, which is a remarkable feature of touchscreen-based educational games. Because learners are allowed to physically manipulate (e.g., rotate, zoom, tap or drag) the virtual objects in the learning material, these bodily actions or sensorimotor experiences in the touchscreen environment are assumed to be beneficial for learning according to ECT. However, an opposite explanation is proposed by cognitive load theory (CLT). When learning by playing on a touchscreen, learners need to invest cognitive resources to process some tasks which are not related to learning per se, for example, interactive manipulations or information processing switching. These tasks may lead to an increase in extraneous cognitive load, which is detrimental to learning according to CLT. Characteristics related to learners, learning materials and learning environments may be important factors influencing the effects of touchscreen learning.
With those mentioned above in mind, drawing firm conclusions of touchscreen learning is still challenging. It is still too early to widely introduce touchscreen devices to learning and teaching scenarios. Even so, this review forms a unique perspective in the touchscreen learning field and contributes to shaping directions for future research. Future studies are highly needed to focus on the theoretical construction, influencing factors, characteristic analyses and behavioral or neural mechanism of touchscreen learning.
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