Promoting Elementary Pupils’ Learning Motivation in Environmental Education with Mobile Inquiry-Oriented Ambience-Aware Fieldwork

Morris Siu-yung Jong
Additional contact information
Morris Siu-yung Jong: Department of Curriculum and Instruction & Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 7, 1-16

Abstract: Mobile learning (M-learning) has been in high regard for motivating today’s children to learn in schools. The present initiative, which harnesses M-learning in environmental education, aims to promote elementary pupils’ learning motivation through engaging them in conducting mobile inquiry-oriented ambience-aware fieldwork (MIAF) in outdoor landscapes. Besides presenting the rationale and pedagogic design of the initiative, this paper reports and discusses the findings of a quasi-experiment which examined the motivational effectiveness of MIAF in comparison with the conventional inquiry-oriented fieldtrip-based learning approach’s. The experiment was grounded upon the instructional motivation theory of ARCS (Attention, Relevance, Confidence and Satisfaction), involving a total of 145 elementary pupils. Results showed that, compared to the conventional approach, MIAF had significantly positive effects on the experimental group (versus the control group) upon the constructs of “A”, “C”, and “S”, but not “R”. This study offers researchers and practitioners in the domains of environmental education and M-learning new insights into adopting mobile devices in outdoor contexts, in particular, shedding light on designing and implementing inquiry-oriented fieldtrip-based learning in the natural environment.

Keywords: M-learning; environmental education; learning motivation; ambient learning; outdoor fieldwork; inquiry-oriented learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/7/2504/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/7/2504/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:17:y:2020:i:7:p:2504-:d:342052

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().