Students' motivation and mobile learning experiences, case LUAS

The topic of this paper is students’ motivation and mobile learning. Students in different achievement goal orientation profiles orientate themselves differently towards learning and studying. There is a lot of current interest to find an easy access into learning spaces for those students who have low motivation because of fear of failure and academic withdrawal. Mobile learning offers a readily available chance with a low threshold to view materials and to carry out mobile assignments. This case study dealt with previous results of achievement goal orientation study combined with the results of mobile learning experiments conducted in this study. The aim of the study was to reveal if any correlation could be found between students’ achievement goal orientation profiles and results from mobile assignments students did with smartphones on the course “The basics of databases”. The second aim was to examine how students experienced assignments done by using a smartphone. The sample consisted of students of second academic year (N=173) at the Faculty of Technology at Lahti University of Applied Sciences in Finland. The results of the study imply that no correlation can be found between orientation profiles and outcomes from mobile assignments. Contrary to what was expected, students with a positive orientation profile (mastery-oriented and success-oriented) did not get any better results from mobile assignments than students with a negative orientation profile (avoidance-oriented). This in turn implies that students with an avoidance-oriented profile could benefit from mobile assignments. According to an after-course questionnaire, students seemed to experience the compulsory mobile assignments positively. They seemed to think that mobile tasks were a refreshing change, as none of them had previous experience of doing assignments using smartphone.

By implementing CDIO we can offer the students more active learning experiences (projects, PBL, teamwork, peer and self-assessment). This should reflect on the achievement orientation and motivation of the students.

Proceedings of the 10th International CDIO Conference, Barcelona, Spain, June 15-19 2014