Children and young people live very digital lives: At school, as part of extracurricular activities and to keep in touch with classmates outside of school, for example through gaming and message threads.
A decade of research has shown small but significant correlations between 'screen time' and well-being. And psychologically speaking, we are beginning to see that the most negative consequences can be found in areas not directly related to screen time. Negative online behaviours and experiences (NOBE) include bullying/exclusion, perfection-seeking social media usage patterns, and usage that feels more pressured, automatic and externally driven than active, internally driven and socially valuable.
The NOBE project is a basic research project to develop learning materials and test them as part of an intervention experiment. As adults, we should pay more attention to how digital life and digital behaviour evolves as phones and online games begin to quietly take hold in children’s lives, even though it can be difficult to understand, talk about and, not least, keep up with.
Every child with well-being issues is entitled to support from adults, especially as part of our new digital reality.
In 2025, the NOBE project must be ready to conduct a large control group experiment in which we will attempt to break down the barriers to the often invisible digital life of children/young people at three schools in the city of Aarhus.
In the period 2023-2024, we will be doing a lot of legwork such as speaking with pupils and learning about the best and worst aspects of their nascent online life during 3rd-4th grades and during their fully-fledged digital life in 7th-8th grades.
We will do this via interviews and observations at a large number of schools, and we will observe breaktimes and conduct a (very needed) mapping of the use of digital learning tools and materials in class. This work can be incorporated in the debate about whether primary and lower secondary schools have become too digital.
After two years, in 2025-2026 the NOBE experiment will include on the curriculum discussions about good (and bad) digital habits and experiences at the three participating schools as a minimum.
Although we clearly need to do more research before fully committing to anything, the plan is for all pupils in 3rd-4th grades and 7th-8th grades to have free class discussion periods about their digital lives. These discussions will help teachers and parents develop as good digital adults. In half of the classrooms, the invisible thoughts and experiences of pupils will also be collected and visualised using the M-Path app in an attempt to involve parents and teachers in these thoughts and experiences. We believe that invisibility is the biggest barrier to dialogue between children and their adults about bad online experiences - from idealised photos on social media to exclusion from peer communities. We will compare the development of these pupils with pupils at other schools.
A control group experiment means that we will not just be testing something new. We will conduct objective scientific measurements of changes in well-being and awareness of NOBE factors both before and after the experiment. We will then compare these changes with other pupils of the same age who did not participate in the intervention.
In collaboration with teachers and learning material designers from læremiddel.dk, the NOBE project will develop research-based lesson packs on the NOBE factors, which can be used individually or as part of a series of free class discussion periods about the pupils' digital lives.
The M-Path group from the Belgian university, KU Leuven, is developing a tool that uses visualisations on the phone and in the classroom to help teachers talk about the factors that most affect children at their schools. The app was designed for group therapy and treatment courses. We will use the same technology to generate visualisations, where an anonymous pool of responses by pupils can help teachers and parents 'see' what is going on at their own school. Do many people feel digitally excluded? What about online bullying? And are beauty ideals on social media really an issue in 4th grade?
The materials will be made available on læremiddel.dk as the project progresses.
The NOBE project is anchored at DPU, Aarhus University under the leadership of Associate Professor in educational psychology Andreas Lieberoth and has received funding from the Rockwool Foundation. The teaching materials and intervention cycles will be developed in collaboration with Læremiddel.dk and with technical contributions from KU Leuven in Belgium.
