ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1613793
This article is part of the Research TopicDigital Learning Innovations: Trends Emerging Scenario, Challenges and OpportunitiesView all 30 articles
Beyond Devices: Preschoolers' Learning Behaviors as Moderators of the Link Between Home Digital Resource and Digital Literacy
Provisionally accepted
- Daejeon University, Daejeon, Republic of Korea
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This study investigated how preschoolers' learning behaviors moderate the relationship between home digital environments and their digital literacy. Digital literacy was conceptualized in two domains: operational skills, which involve the ability to manipulate digital devices, and cultural skills, which emphasize creative engagement and meaning-making. Participants included 507 preschool-aged children and their mothers in South Korea. Mothers reported on home digital resources and children's learning behaviors, while validated scales were used to assess operational and cultural digital literacy. Moderation analyses tested whether competence motivation, attention/persistence, and learning strategy influenced the strength of the relationship between digital access and literacy outcomes. The results showed that access to home digital resources significantly predicted both operational and cultural digital literacy. For operational literacy, competence motivation and learning strategy strengthened the effect of digital access, suggesting that motivated and strategically engaged children gained greater technical benefits. Attention/persistence, however, did not moderate this relationship. For cultural literacy, competence motivation again acted as a positive moderator, indicating that motivated children engaged more deeply with symbolic and creative aspects of digital media. In contrast, learning strategy unexpectedly weakened the relationship, suggesting that children with less structured approaches benefited more from home digital exposure in this domain. These findings highlight that digital device access alone is not sufficient for literacy development. Children's motivational and strategic dispositions shape how digital resources are translated into skills. Effective approaches to supporting early digital literacy should integrate both access to digital tools and opportunities to foster motivation, curiosity, and self-regulation in young learners.
Keywords: Digital Literacy, Preschool children, Learning behaviors, Home digital resources, Techno-subsystem
Received: 17 Apr 2025; Accepted: 12 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Moon. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Young Kyung Moon, moonyk@dju.kr
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