Exploring and mapping young children’s digital emergent writing on tablets

The use of tablets by young children is increasing and more research is needed to understand how to evaluate and map the emergence of digital writing. To explore this, children (aged 2–5 years; N = 48) were asked to write on an iPad using a drawing app (1×10-minute session/week over 9 weeks). Traditional frameworks for early writing development were used to map the types of marks young children created with their fingers on iPads. The types of digital writing children created ranged across ‘scribble marks’, ‘invented marks’, ‘invented letters’, ‘conventional letters’, and ‘word writing’. In contrast to viewing children as having writing abilities at only a single level of writing development, individual children were observed to produce digital marks representative of different stages of writing development. Providing new ways of mapping the emergence of digital mark making will help early childhood educators better understand digital writing development.