In the last decade, research on children's interactions with digital technology in early childhood has been emerging. A growing body of research has shown that children from a very young age have access to digital technology in their homes. Researchers have turned their attention on the potential of digital technology to be integrated in a playbased pedagogy and investigate what the positive outcomes for children might be. However, limited research has explored the different ways children between the ages of three and four years engage with digital technology or compared their engagement with non-digital activities in early childhood education. Therefore, this study aims to explore how children engage and interact with digital and non-digital activities. A mixed method approach was employed for this research study in order to explore how children engage and interact with digital and non-digital activities. The FraIM design: Framework for an Integrated Methodology supported the integration of quantitative method and qualitative method in this research study. The observation checklist was used to measure the children's levels of engagement to capture the extent to which they were engaged and the less structured observation gave an in-depth view into the different ways the children were engaged with digital and non-digital activities. 14 children between the ages of 3-4 years in an early childhood setting in England participated. Findings revealed that digital activities such as applications on an iPad can impact on children's engagement positively. Although the quantitative data indicated that higher levels of engagement occurred with digital activities than non-digital activities, the qualitative data showed that this difference is not immense. The data also showed that the children exhibited similar playful patterns of interactions while they interacted with digital and non-digital activities. The patterns include pleasure, spontaneity, role identification, intrinsic motivation, self-regulation, self-initiated actions and preference.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:715973 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Folorunsho, Aderonke Ifeoma |
| Publisher | Canterbury Christ Church University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://create.canterbury.ac.uk/15957/ |
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