Should Young Children Be Doing Homework on Screens?

Dear Stephanie,

Thank you for writing, and for raising such thoughtful questions. I share your concerns, and I think the questions you're asking are exactly the ones schools should be considering before introducing digital technology to young children.

I agree with your distinction between a digital device as a tool and as a source of entertainment. Children will certainly encounter the entertainment possibilities of screens soon enough. I don't see a developmental reason for schools to introduce six-year-olds to a system in which learning on a screen earns points that can then be exchanged for avatar features or games.

I'm particularly concerned about the reward system. Children are naturally motivated to master new skills. Learning to read, write, calculate, and understand how the world works can bring its own satisfaction: "I figured it out!" "I can do this now!" When we routinely add points, prizes, or access to games, we risk shifting the child's attention away from that sense of mastery toward earning the reward.

There is considerable research supporting this concern. A meta-analysis of 128 studies found that expected tangible rewards—including rewards for participating in, completing, or performing well at an activity—can undermine intrinsic motivation, with stronger negative effects of tangible rewards found in children than in college students:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10589297/

A classic experiment with young children illustrates the problem particularly well. Preschoolers who already enjoyed drawing were promised a reward for drawing. Later, when no reward was offered, those children showed less interest in drawing than children who had not expected a reward:

https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ085275

I remember experiencing this myself when rewards for reading were introduced when I was a child. I loved reading. But once I was rewarded for how much I read, I found myself choosing easier books and rushing through them. The incentive had subtly changed the activity: instead of reading for the experience of reading, I was reading to earn the reward.

So I think your concern about children choosing easier exercises to earn points more quickly is well founded. A large meta-analysis covering 40 years of research found that intrinsic motivation was particularly important for the quality of performance, whereas external incentives were more predictive of quantity:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24491020/

I also think you're raising an important question about whether children should first have the opportunity to establish foundational reading and writing skills before schools ask them to do academic work on screens.

Writing by hand is hard work for a six-year-old—but that effort is part of learning to write. The child is learning to form letters, coordinate complex movements, connect those movements with sounds and symbols, and gradually make all of that automatic enough to free up attention for spelling and composing. Research suggests that handwriting supports processes involved in letter recognition and literacy development in ways that typing does not. For example, research with five-year-olds found that handwriting letters, compared with typing or tracing them, produced different activation in brain regions involved in letter processing and the developing reading system:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211949312000038

I have similar concerns about reading. Screens are inherently more enticing than a printed page, particularly when the device also offers points, avatars, games, animation, and other rewards. Young children are still developing the capacity for sustained attention that reading requires. I would rather protect the time in these early years for developing a relationship with books and the ability to stay with the slower rewards of reading.

More broadly, technology always has an opportunity cost. Time on a tablet is time not spent writing by hand, reading a physical book, drawing, building, manipulating objects, moving, playing, talking with another person, or engaging directly with the physical world. Those experiences are doing enormously important developmental work at six.

That doesn't mean children should never learn to use technology. I think of this as a "digital apprenticeship": once children actually need digital tools, adults gradually teach them to use those tools intentionally and wisely. But digital apprenticeship is not a reason to introduce technology early. Six-year-olds don't need tablets to learn to read, write, or do math, and I don't see any advantage to rushing them onto screens simply because the technology is available.

UNESCO's Global Education Monitoring Report on technology in education may be especially useful for your meeting. The report emphasizes that technology should be used in education when it supports learning—not simply because it is available—and points out that the added value of many educational technologies has not been established: https://gem-report-2023.unesco.org/

So at the meeting, I might ask the school a very simple question:

"What does doing this homework digitally offer these six-year-olds that justifies what it replaces?"

I would also ask:

• Whether this particular app has been independently studied with children this age;
• Where is the evidence that children learn more from using it than from a non-digital alternative;
• What evidence the school has that rewarding schoolwork with points and games supports children’s long-term motivation to learn, rather than shifting their motivation toward earning the rewards;
• Whether parents who prefer to protect these early years for non-digital learning could choose an equivalent paper-and-pencil activity.

The relevant question isn't simply whether children can learn something from an educational app. Of course they can. The question is whether this is a better way for a six-year-old to spend this learning time than the non-digital alternative.

I think you're asking important questions, Stephanie. Children will have many years to become proficient with technology. We don't need to rush them. These early years for developing their bodies, attention, imaginations, reading, writing, and love of learning are precious—and we don't get them back.

Warmly,

Dr. Laura