Abstract:

Ambient learning, which is a subset of mobile learning, harnesses context-aware technology (e.g., the global positioning system [GPS]) in the course of learning and teaching to support “instructional contextualisation,” i.e., instructional content is dynamically adaptive to the ambience where students are contextually situated. Mobile inquiry-oriented ambience-aware fieldwork (MIAF) is an initiative that integrates the idea of ambient learning into outdoor inquiry-oriented fieldwork.

Teachers are always “gatekeepers” of educational innovations in schools. This paper reports a study in which we evaluated the motivational affordance of MIAF in science education from the teacher perspective through the ARCS Instructional Motivation Theory. Attention (A) refers to how well an approach can capture students’ interest, stimulate their thinking, and sustain their attention throughout the pedagogical process. Relevance (R) refers to how well an approach can address students’ needs, set meaningful learning goals for them, and offer them learning experiences related to the real world. Confidence (C) refers to how well an approach can help students develop a positive expectation of success, support them in believing their ability to achieve the learning goals, and let them know the final success stemming from their effort made. Satisfaction (S) refers to how well an approach can facilitate students to recognise the rewards of the newly acquired knowledge, articulate positive feelings to their interim accomplishments, and strengthen their sense of success at the end of the pedagogical process.

This evaluative study involved 32 Hong Kong secondary science teachers. The data collection was carried through a validated ARCS-questionnaire-based survey with the aim of gathering how the teachers perceived the motivational affordance of MAIF. The survey was conducted right after a professional development workshop in which the teachers had played the “student role” to pursue MAIF in a wetland park for studying a curricular topic, “Looking at Living Things.” Positive results in terms of the 4 motivational constructs were obtained. The details of the findings, as well as the research implications and limitations, will be delineated in our final paper.

Keywords:

Ambient learning, mobile learning, science teachers, motivational affordance, ARCS.