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Analysing moderators and critical factors that affect early childhood education with the usage of touchscreen contrivances: A hybrid fuzzy AHP—fuzzy TOPSIS approach

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Abstract

Context

In the children’s education process, not only children but parents, educators, and teachers are using touchscreen technology-enabled contrivances for better quality of life. Every stakeholder has their perspective on the usage of touchscreen contrivances. A lot of moderators and critical factors affect this perception.

Objective

To analyse the moderators and critical factors that affect early childhood education.

Method

A comprehensive literature survey and focused group discussion members have finalized six moderators and ten critical factors that affect early childhood education. A hybrid fuzzy AHP- fuzzy TOPSIS has been used to rank identified critical factors. Fuzzy AHP is used to get the weights of the moderators and fuzzy TOPSIS used these weights to rank the critical factors.

Results

The moderator ‘children age’ is having the highest normalized weight (0.211) and the ‘screen size’ is having the lowest normalized weight (0.106). The two most critical factors that ranked first and second are ‘app features and content’ and ‘applied pedagogical approach’ having closeness coefficients of 0.9713 and 0.9594.

Potential future scope

The results of the study will help the teachers, parents, and educators to focus on the highly ranked factors which will directly or indirectly improve the children’s education.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chitkara University Institute of Engineering and Technology, Chitkara University, Rajpura, Punjab, India

    Vinay Kukreja, Anuj Kumar Jain & Rajesh Kumar Kaushal

  2. School of Sciences and Emerging Technologies, Jagat Guru Nanak Dev Punjab State Open University, Patiala, Punjab, India

    Amitoj Singh

  3. Chitkara Business School, Chitkara University, Rajpura, Punjab, India

    Arun Aggarwal

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  1. Vinay Kukreja
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Appendix A

Appendix A

Abbreviation

Full Form

AHP

Analytic hierarchy process

TOPSIS

Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution

STEM

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics

ELECTRE

ELimination Et Choix Traduisant la REalité

VIKOR

Vlse Kriterijumska Optimizacija Kompromisno Resenje

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Kukreja, V., Jain, A., Singh, A. et al. Analysing moderators and critical factors that affect early childhood education with the usage of touchscreen contrivances: A hybrid fuzzy AHP—fuzzy TOPSIS approach. Educ Inf Technol 28, 5621–5650 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-022-11379-9

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