Fostering Student Engagement in a Mobile Formative Assessment System for High-School Economics

Abstract

In a mobile learning environment, students can learn via mobile devices without being limited by time and space. Therefore, it is vital to develop tools to assist students to learn and assess their knowledge in such environments. This paper presents a tool/application for formative self-assessment. The tool supports the selection of questions based on user-defined criteria concerning (1) the difficulty level; (2) the associated concepts; and (3) the purposes of the test taker. The main purpose of the presented tool is to better support the learning aims of the participants and to increase their engagement in the learning process. The focus of this study is to evaluate the tool using quizzes in Microeconomics to realize its potential in this specific domain. Teachers and students were involved in the experiments conducted. The experiments demonstrated that the presented tool is usable; it motivates the students and improves their understanding.