Stop and Think: Exploring Mobile Notifications to Foster Reflective Practice on Meta-Learning

Nowadays, smartphone users are constantly receiving notifications from applications that provide feedback, as reminders, recommendations or announcements. Nevertheless, there is little research on the effects of mobile notifications to foster meta-learning. This paper explores the effectiveness of m...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on learning technologies 2015-01, Vol.8 (1), p.124-135
Main Authors: Tabuenca, Bernardo, Kalz, Marco, Ternier, Stefaan, Specht, Marcus
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
College Students
Educational institutions
Educational Technology
Electronic Publishing
Foreign Countries
Formative Evaluation
Handheld Devices
Internet
Learning
Lifelong Learning
meta-learning
Mobile communication
Mobile handsets
mobile learning
Performance evaluation
Pretests Posttests
Prompting
Questionnaires
Reflection
Reflective Teaching
Secondary School Students
Secondary Schools
Student Attitudes
Technology Uses in Education
Telecommunications
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Summary:Nowadays, smartphone users are constantly receiving notifications from applications that provide feedback, as reminders, recommendations or announcements. Nevertheless, there is little research on the effects of mobile notifications to foster meta-learning. This paper explores the effectiveness of mobile notifications to foster reflection on meta-learning by presenting the results of two studies: (1) a formative study with 37 secondary school students offering a daily reflection and reporting exercise about their learning experience during the day; (2) an experiment involving 60 adults to read an eBook on energy-efficient driving for one hour. During that time, the participants received mobile notifications inviting them to reflect in-action. On the one hand, the results from the first study show that students do not have a habit of seeing themselves as learners and developing a "professional" awareness about their daily activity at work/school. On the other hand, the second study explores the effects of different notification types on knowledge gain and motivation. Results envision a higher knowledge gain and motivation for the group assigned with the least complex interactions with mobile devices during the reflection exercise. Finally, these results are discussed and important research questions for future research on mobile notifications are raised.
ISSN:1939-1382
1939-1382
2372-0050
DOI:10.1109/TLT.2014.2383611