Hi everybody! How is your condition today? I hope we are in a good condition, stay safe and stay healthy. Today I want to talk about this journal article (Facilitating application of language skill in authentic environment with a mobile learning system). This article was conducted by Shadiev et al and published in 2017.
Well, according to Sun and Looi 2017, it is important that students are able to not only acquire a new knowledge in class but also apply it outside the school. This is especially true for such subjects as English Foreign Language (EFL) and other subjects. The result of most of these study have been positive.
However, the authors of this journal article uncovered two critical issues. First issue is that some studies have shown that mobile learning technology is not beneficial for all students. Based on Tingir et al 2017, some students, particularly in elementary or junior high school, reported that it was not easy to acquire knowledge or apply it in technologically supported learning environment. As a result, negative effects of mobile learning on student achievement, cognitive load, performance, and concentration were reported. One reason of this is that in-field mobile learning environment are complex because they combine a physical learning material and digital learning resources, and the learning pace in such environment is different. Second issue associates with how familiar students are with the authentic environment in which they learn using mobile technology. Familiar authentic environment can be found at places near students’ background and previous experience. The learning environment used in Chen et al 2008, though, was only “virtual authentic” and so was not truly familiar to the students under consideration. In some studies, an authentic learning environment was created in school but they are not able to experience real-world situation there.
To address these issues, the authors designed three learning tasks for a class of 26 junior high school students. The first task is completing the task in authentic environment individually, the second is loosely collaborating with peers, and the third is tightly collaborating with peers. A mobile learning was also designed in this study to support students to accomplish the tasks. The results demonstrate that most of the students highly valued authors’ learning system and intended to use it in the future. Furthermore, the results show that the students performed best when they collaborated. Based on the results. We can learn that even in complex environment, less skilled and experienced students with low prior knowledge can perform well when they tightly collaborate with more skilled and experienced students with high prior knowledge, and authors’ learning system can facilitate such collaboration.
Catatan Rafikah 