Discussion
The tablet computer applications were able to direct children’s attention to the intrinsic and germane content. From a Luhmann-communications perspective, the design of the content in the applications promoted a successful user- tablet computer communicative encounter because the more educationally cogent information was more visually attractive leading to more successful child-tablet computer interaction, regardless of the children’s cognitive abilities.
From a cognitive psychology perspective an interpretation of this result is that the tablet applications all generate high information interactivity – that is, information content cannot be learned in isolation but must be understood by their relations to each other on screen (Sweller, 1994 p. 304-306). For Sweller (1994) in learning scenarios where there is high interactivity—as is this case in the multimedia content found on tablet computers—extraneous cognitive load can interfere with learning. The finding that the extraneous content was less “noticeable” by children may indicate that children were only manipulating and developing schemas for the intrinsic and germane content and did not have working memory available to process extraneous content. Thus, it is both a function of intentionally sound application design and an indication of high interactivity in the educational application learning context.
Another result of interest is that the children assessed as high EF found the intrinsic content from the educational applications more important than the germane content, while low EF children found the germane content more important than the intrinsic content. This could indicate that high EF children were utilizing pre-existing schemas in the processing of intrinsic content (hence a lower germane load), while low EF children needed to create and/or automate schemas to process the intrinsic content encountered in the applications (hence a higher germane load) (Paas et al., 2004).
Two results that appear to be consistent with existing theory from both communications studies and cognitive psychology are that, (a) low EF children appeared to experience more difficulty extracting information from the applications than high EF children; and (b) low EF children seem to take advantage of the germane content for simple applications but high EF children take advantage of the germane content for complex applications. In both (a) and (b) the analysis could be the same, and both communication theorists and cognitive psychologists could agree that children’s success in managing and extracting information content is positively related to their cognitive abilities. From a communications theory perspective, more successful user-device communication (messages from the sender is received and understood by the receiver) is indicative of higher cognitive ability. From a cognitive psychology perspective, increased executive functioning is co-related with the child’s utilization of existing schemas (i.e., attending to intrinsic content) or the creation and utilization of new schemas (i.e., attending to germane content), when required by a high level of information interactivity (i.e., complex applications).