Mobile Technology, Learning, and Achievement: Advances in Understanding and Measuring the Role of Mobile Technology in Education

Publication date: Available online 26 November 2019Source: Contemporary Educational PsychologyAuthor(s): Matthew L. Bernacki, Jeffrey A. Greene, Helen CromptonAbstractStudying mobile learning – the use of personal electronic devices to engage in learning across multiple contexts via connections to media, educators, peers, experts, and the larger world – is a relatively new academic enterprise. In this special issue, we interrogated the promise and unexamined expectations of mobile learning, the theories and ideas developing around it, and the devices that afford it. The articles introduce mobile and wearable technologies as key components of empirical research and demonstrate ways that learning conducted with such devices (1) affects the process and products of learning via interactions with other psychological constructs; (2) affords new opportunities to directly influence learning process or outcomes; and (3) provides opportunities to collect previously unobtainable data that improve understanding and modeling of the learning process. In this introduction, we overview the emergence of mobile learning theory and its contemporary conceptualization. Then we highlight ways that mobile technologies can be used to enhance learning processes and an understanding of them. All special issue contributors conceptualize and align their work with both psychological theories of learning and instruction as well as emerging theories of mobile learning. The commentary authors appraise m...
Source: Contemporary Educational Psychology - Category: Child Development Source Type: research