As more and more new technologies get introduced into educational institutions at an earlier age, today’s research efforts indeed fail to meet a number of sound research criteria: long-term evaluation, assessment of benefits AND risks not only for academic success but also for health and well-being, and setting up alternative intervention control groups requiring a comparable financial investment. Non-intervention control groups are insufficient control groups (cf. Armstrong & Casement, 2000). Public funding for this research is essential to avoid the conflicts of interest that would occur – and are already occurring – when IT corporations fund the trials to test the effectiveness of the educational software that they themselves produce.

paula bleckmann

Pulkkinen, L., Clouder, C., & Heys, B. (2018). Toward media literacy or media addiction ? – contours of good governance for healthy childhood in the digital world, 7, 103–119.