Examining the Uses of Student-Led, Teacher-Led, and Collaborative Functions of Mobile Technology and Their Impacts on Physics Achievement and Interest

As mobile technology becomes more frequently used in science learning, understanding the relationship between student outcomes and the technology’s pedagogical features is drawing increasing attention. This study focuses on one pedagogical feature—“who led the use.” We first categorized 15 specific uses of mobile technology into three categories: student-led (i.e., initiated by the students and teachers have no or minimal influence on their use), teacher-led (i.e., initiated by teachers and the students have no or minimal impact on their use), and collaborative functions (i.e., both students and teacher need to play active roles in the use of mobile technology). We recruited 803 high school students who used a one-to-one tablet for 5 months and examined their use frequency, the functions used, and their physics outcomes. Results indicate a significant difference in the use frequency among the three categories. The collaborative functions were used with the highest frequency, whereas the student-led functions were used least. However, the student-led functions had a more significant effect size than the collaborative functions to predict both students’ physics achievement and physics interest, while teacher-led functions failed to predict either of these outcome variables.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for Lehong Shi, who helped with data analyses and also proofread the manuscript. The authors also thank Dr. Meilan Zhang for her generous help with the instrument design.

Funding

Author Xiaoming Zhai was supported by two grants from the Ministry of Education of China under Grant No. 13YJA880022 and No. DCA110195. Xiaoming Zhai was also funded by the Chinese Scholarship Council (No. 201506040139). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Ministry of Education of China.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

1. Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, 520 Galvez Mall, CERAS Building 116, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA Xiaoming Zhai
2. Department of Physics, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China Xiaoming Zhai
3. College of Education, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195, USA Min Li & Siwei Chen

1. Xiaoming Zhai