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 or space. Therefore, it is vital to develop tools to assist students in learning and assessing 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) difficulty level, (2) associated concepts, and (3) purposes of the test taker. The main purpose of the tool is to better support participants' learning aims and increase their engagement in the learning process. The focus of this study is to evaluate the tool using quizzes in Microeconomics to explore its potential in this specific domain. Teachers and students participated in the experiments, which demonstrated that the tool is usable, motivates students, and improves their understanding.