Digital Literacy Practices in Early Childhood Education

Digital literacy practices in early childhood education encompass the skills, dispositions and social activities through which children aged three to eight engage with digital media. Grounded in a sociocultural perspective, this field examines how young learners acquire operational competence—such as touchscreen navigation—alongside critical and creative capacities for meaning-making. Practitioners and researchers emphasise developmentally appropriate pedagogy, integrating digital tools into play-based and project-oriented learning that supports emergent literacy, numeracy and multimodal expression. Empirical work has traced children’s evolving interaction with tablets, interactive story apps and multimedia authoring platforms in classrooms and homes around the world. Attention to the embodied and material dimensions of digital events has prompted innovative video-based and mixed-methods approaches, revealing how peer collaboration, parental mediation and cultural contexts shape digital engagements. Policy makers now recognise early digital literacy as foundational to equitable participation in contemporary society, leading to curriculum frameworks that balance screen-based activities with traditional literacy, social-emotional development and offline exploratory play.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have employed large-scale longitudinal data to map trajectories of children’s touchscreen use, demonstrating that guided interactions with educational apps can accelerate vocabulary growth and symbolic play. Cross-national comparative analyses have highlighted how differing curriculum policies influence the integration of coding activities into early years settings, with evidence that contextually tailored professional development enhances educators’ confidence and effectiveness. Neurodevelopmental research has also begun to uncover the cognitive correlates of early digital engagement, suggesting that scaffolded multimodal storytelling may support executive functions such as working memory and attentional control.

Digital Literacy Practices in Early Childhood Education publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in digital literacy practices in early childhood education across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Digital literacy: The ability to access, evaluate, create and communicate information using digital technologies.

Multimodal literacy: Competence in interpreting and producing meaning across multiple modes, such as text, image, audio and gesture.

Emergent literacy: Early reading and writing behaviours observed before formal instruction in conventional literacy.

Technoliteracy capabilities: Framework for evaluating children’s skills in searching, judging, creating and sharing digital content.

Sociocultural theory: A perspective that situates learning in social interaction and cultural context, emphasising mediation by tools and language.

References

1. A Mixed Methods Approach to Analyzing Embodied Interaction: The Potentials of Integrated Mixed Methods Analysis of Video Interaction Data. Journal of Mixed Methods Research (2023).
2. An exploration of online technoliteracy capability teaching and learning in early years classrooms. Education and Information Technologies (2023).
3. A systematic review on the effectiveness of children’s interactive reading applications for promoting their emergent literacy in the multimedia context. Contemporary Educational Technology (2023).
4. Capturing the sociomateriality of digital literacy events. Research in Learning Technology (2014).
5. Young children’s at-home digital experiences and interactions: an ethnographic study. Frontiers in Education (2024).