Impact of mobile technology on student attitudes, engagement, and learning

Mobile devices and collaborative learning environments are common tools in education but not all collaborative learning is structured the same. This study evaluated student learning in three different collaborative learning environments, both with and without mobile technology, to assess students' engagement, critical thinking, and attitudes toward collaborative learning. The results indicate that mobile technology is associated with positive student perceptions of collaborative learning but with increased disengagement by students during class. In addition, the level of students' critical thinking was more closely associated with the tools used to construct written responses than with the collaborative learning environment style. Students constructing paragraph responses on a mobile device demonstrated significantly less critical thinking than those who used a computer keyboard or wrote responses by hand.