Exposure to teachers and teaching-related activities is vital for young children's learning. When COVID-19 closed schools, teachers responded with a mix of live- and prerecorded lessons and one-on-one communication with students, which necessitated shifts in planning time. The current study identifies pre-COVID predictors of time teachers devoted…

Given the increasing use of app books with young children, research is needed to inform their selection and design. Although broad guidelines exist, more fine-grained guidance is needed. To address this need, we explored the relations among app books' digital affordances, readers' behaviors with these affordances during both buddy and individual…

Interactive app books are increasingly part of young children's literacy ecosystem. However, most previous studies examined buddy reading with traditional print books or CD-ROM books. Little is known about whether and how buddy reading with app books might be related to subsequent individual reading. To address this, informed by multimodal…

The aim of the present study was to investigate the associations between parental and teacher support and elementary students' academic skills during the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on data of an ongoing longitudinal study, we studied the roles of children's (N = 63) academic skills before the first COVID-19 lockdown in Germany (March-June 2020)…

Thousands of educational apps are available to students, teachers, and parents, yet research on their effectiveness is limited. This meta-analysis synthesized findings from 36 intervention studies and 285 effect sizes evaluating the effectiveness of educational apps for preschool to Grade 3 children and the moderating role of methodological,…

This study employs a sequential multiple assignment randomized trial (SMART) design to develop an adaptive intervention with personalized print and digital content for kindergarten to Grade 2 children (n = 273). In Stage 1, we ask whether it is better for children to receive an adaptive intervention based on (a) 10 conceptually coherent texts or…