The Use Of Mobile Learning Resources To Enhance Physics Learning For Engineering Students: A Six Year Study

The use of mobile devices for learning purposes has increased in recent years, but there has been little effort to measure its impact on student outcomes. The goals of this work are: to quantify the impact of using mobile learning resources on academic performance and to know the student perception about these resources. Our hypothesis is that mobile learning resources have a positive effect on the learning processes. We evaluate the effectiveness of two mobile learning resources for engineering students regarding free body diagram and conservation of linear momentum. We gave pre and post-tests to experimental and control groups during a 6-year time span and analyzed the differences in the learning gains for both groups. We also gave perception questionnaires to our students about the use of mobile learning resources. With a sample of N = 645 students, we found that the experimental group obtained learning gains 7-10 points higher (on a 0-100 scale) than the control group. We found robust evidence regarding the effectiveness of our mobile learning resources through linear regressions (p = 0.001-0.053) and t-Student tests (p = 0.002-0.045). However, the observed effect size was only ES = 0.28. The student perception questionnaires indicate that students found the implementation of mobile learning resources to be very useful. Our results are indicative of a positive impact of the use of mobile learning resources to enhance student concept comprehension and problem-solving skills in undergraduate Physics courses.