The impact of tablet devices on high school students' cognitive load and learning

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‘The best app is the teacher’ introducing classroom scripts in technology-enhanced education

A quasi-experimental study was set up in secondary education to study the role of teachers while implementing tablet devices in science education. Three different classroom scripts that guided students and teachers' actions during the intervention on two social planes (group and classroom level) are compared. The main goal was to investigate which classroom script leads to the best results regarding progress in domain-specific knowledge and inquiry skills. Besides student achievement, students' experiences towards the role of the teacher and students' perceptions towards learning with tablets within the three conditions were investigated. In the first condition, the classroom script included learning activities that were balanced between the group and the classroom level. In the second condition, the learning activities occurred predominantly on the group level. The third condition entailed the classroom script as the control condition in which the learning activities were situated only on the classroom level, with the tablet used in a traditional way or as ‘book behind glass’. Results show that students perform better on domain-specific knowledge in the conditions where the teacher intervened on the classroom level. Regarding the acquisition of inquiry skills, students performed best in the condition where the learning activities were balanced between the group and the classroom level. Moreover, students who perceived more structure achieved better. These results indicate that the role of the teacher cannot be ignored in technology-enhanced learning. Moreover, these results seem to suggest that one of the best apps remains the teacher

Son, are you on Facebook? The impact of parental involvement in school interventions about E-safety

Media literacy interventions in secondary education typically have a limited impact on the participants’ behavior. Therefore, we developed a new e-safety intervention using a design-based research methodology. In the current study, it was verified whether involving parents actively in this intervention was helpful to decrease unsafe behavior on social network sites, or at least the intentions to behave unsafely. A quasi-experimental study with pre- and post-test measures in secondary education (n=207) showed that parental involvement was beneficial to change the intentions to engage in certain unsafe behavior, and to reduce existing problematic behavior, particularly for boys. These findings have important implications for research and practice, guiding us toward more effective e-safety interventions

Teaching and Learning with Mobile Technology : A Qualitative Explorative Study about the Introduction of Tablet Devices in Secondary Education

En: PLOS One, 10(12): e0144008. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0144008This paper investigates teachers’ and students’ perceptions concerning the impact of using tablet devices for teaching and learning purposes. An explorative focus group study was conducted with teachers (n = 18) and students (n = 39) in a secondary school that has implemented tablet devices since 2012. The general finding of this study shows that the use of tablet devices in the classroom setting has an impact on both teaching and learning practices. The results suggest that teachers can be divided into two categories: the innovative teachers and the instrumental teachers. Innovative teachers attempt to shift from a teachercentered to a learning-centered approach. They have changed their teaching style by transforming lessons in accordance with the advantages tablet computers can offer. Instrumental teachers seem to use the device as a ‘book behind glass’. The distinction between the two groups has consequences for both the way courses are given and how students experience them. In general, the introduction of tablet devices entails a shift in the way students learn, as the devices provide interactive, media-rich, and exciting new environments. The results of this study indicate that policy makers should consider introducing technical and pedagogical support in order to facilitate both teachers’ and students’ understanding of the full potential of this kind of technology in education

Student acceptance of tablet devices in secondary education: a three-wave longitudinal cross-lagged case study

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