Title: Voluntary participation and natural grouping with smartphones: an effective and practical approach to implement a quasi-experiment

Authors: Jiyou Jia; Zhenzhen Chen

Addresses: Department of Educational Technology, Graduate School of Education, Peking University, 5th Yihe Yuan Road, Hai Dian District, Beijing, China ' Department of Educational Technology, Graduate School of Education, Peking University, 5th Yiheyuan Road, Hai Dian District, Beijing, 100871, China; School of Humanities, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, 10th Xitucheng Road, Hai Dian District, Beijing, 100876, China

Abstract: We propose a voluntary participation approach to naturally generate two groups facilitated with a CMS and the usage of students' smartphones. We applied it in a research of blending smartphones into the university English class for one semester. All students were invited to freely use smartphones in and outside the class to participant in the learning activities in a web-based instruction system and their usage data were stored. They were regarded as experiment students if they participated in at least two learning activities including pretest and posttest, otherwise as control students. The differences of the two groups, including the number and score sum of participated activities indicating participation quantity and the average score of participated activities indicating participation quality, were all statistically significant. The finding demonstrated that the proposed approach is practical for implementing quasi-experiment research in education and effective to improve university students' learning with the help of smartphones.

Keywords: quasi-experiment; voluntary participation; natural grouping; smartphone; classroom instruction; academic performance.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMLO.2020.103935

International Journal of Mobile Learning and Organisation, 2020 Vol.14 No.1, pp.49 - 62

Received: 13 Dec 2018
Accepted: 07 May 2019
Published online: 02 Dec 2019 *

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