The employment of mobile technologies to facilitate inquiry process.
Published in Chapter:
Enhancing Students' Motivation by STEM-Oriented, Mobile, Inquiry-Based Learning
Manolis Kousloglou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece), Anastasios Zoupidis (Democritus University of Thrace, Greece), Anastasios Molohidis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece), and Euripides Hatzikraniotis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece)
Copyright: © 2022
|Pages: 25
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-3861-9.ch009
Abstract
STEM education promotes scientific inquiry and engineering design, including mathematics, incorporating appropriate technologies. Portable technologies motivate active learning of students and enable accessing to learn resources, facilitating cross-disciplinary designing tasks. This chapter initially presents theoretical approaches of STEM education, mobile learning, and inquiry-based learning, and then it describes an inquiry-based short-term intervention that took advantage of portable digital devices in a STEM class. The aim of the intervention was to study its affection on students' motivation about physics. Results indicate that students who participated in the activity had higher motivation scores than their classmates who attended lessons with conventional teaching methods. The findings also show that the students involved in a guided inquiry-based process became more profoundly engaged in STEM than their classmates who followed a structured inquiry process. Other factors, such as grade point average (GPA) and gender, did not seem to affect student motivation.