Young children's performance on self-administered ipad language activities

Twenty-nine English language activities were implemented on a touch-tablet computer. Some activities were focused on a single skill (e.g. reading or speaking), while others involved several integrated skills (e.g. listening and writing). Materials were presented in several modalities, including speech only, speech with figure, silent video, text, speech with text, and speech with text and figure. Response modalities included speech, typing, touch, dragging screen objects, selecting and/or arranging words, and drawing figures. Various test-like sequences of 24 to 45 items were presented to 784 children, 53% from non-English speaking homes. Analysis of over 28,000 responses to these selfadministered activities indicates that most activities can be successfully modeled by a single short instructional video example. By age 8 years, nearly all children will respond meaningfully to about 95% of these specific activities. Examples of these activities and child responses are presented.