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Use of a mobile application to promote scientific discovery learning: students' perceptions towards and practical adoption of a mobile application

This paper examines what students think about the use of a mobile application as a learning support tool and describes how a mobile application helps students improve scientific discovery learning outside of school. To meet the needs of conveniently saving and retrieving student's learning, the customized mobile application eBookMaker was developed for our two studies. This application enables students to quickly create mobile documents offering media-rich functionalities. Thirty-two fourth- and fifth- grade students in a public school participated in the studies. Each student was given an Android-powered Motorola smart phone pre-loaded with eBookMaker. In the first study, students were asked to make a mobile document about what they learned in class and fill out a survey form for their feedback about the use of a mobile application. In the second study, students were required to individually explore the scientific phenomena from their daily life, record their investigations, and create mobile documents using eBookMaker for two weeks outside of school. Based on the findings from these two studies, we can suppose that students have a positive attitude (80% of the students replied that they were mostly satisfied with a mobile application, eBookMaker) towards the use of a mobile application as an educational tool. Furthermore, a majority of students (86%) could figure out their own topics, search relevant information from a variety of sources (i.e. Textbooks or websites), and come to their own conclusion, which is a basic scientific discovery learning process, and even 24% of the students could design an experiment, conduct the experiment and draw a conclusion from the experiment, which is a more advanced scientific discovery learning process.