Author: Emma Liptrot, PhD student, Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology, McGill University

Educators and parents buy educational apps (EduApps) to help children learn, bringing in billions of dollars for the mobile app industry, a significant portion of which goes into the pockets of leading app stores. But when people visit app stores, they are overwhelmed with hundreds of thousands of options. Children can learn from well-designed EduApps, but choosing bad apps wastes schools’ and families’ time and money. When choosing EduApps, our research from the Technology Learning and Cognition lab at McGill University’s Faculty of Education shows educators and parents rely heavily on others’ judgements, like star ratings. But app stores are…