Beyond screen time: What makes educational technology effective, with Nicole Barnes, PhD

“I thought he was playing a video game,” Dr. Nicole Barnes recalls of watching her kindergartner during remote learning in 2020. “There were just colors flying everywhere, characters he was dressing, rewards popping up on the screen.” When she told him to stop playing and get back to his math homework, he replied without skipping a beat: “Mom, this is my math homework.” That moment—a professor of educational psychology unable to tell whether her own child was learning or playing—became the seed of a new APA expert report on educational technology, which Barnes led. The report offers ten research-backed recommendations for parents, educators, and school leaders trying to navigate a landscape where flashy interfaces can easily be mistaken for genuine learning.

Beyond screen time: What the child is actually doing

The report’s first major move is to reframe the conversation away from “screen time.” Barnes acknowledges why parents and schools default to counting minutes: it’s visible and easy to measure. But for educational technology, she argues, the number alone tells you almost nothing. Twenty minutes on a screen could mean deep work through a math problem, or it could mean twenty minutes dressing a character. The same time, radically different learning outcomes.