The effects of mobile learning for nursing students: an integrative evaluation of learning process, learning motivation, and study performance

Abstract

This paper reports a study on the relationships between the variables of nursing students' learning motivation, perception of their mobile learning practice and their study performance. A total of 225 undergraduate nursing students participated in the research. They used a mobile app for fostering clinical knowledge and skills acquired in class, and took part in a questionnaire survey as well as a before-and-after test of their study performance. The results showed that, despite a statistically significant improvement in their study performance after using mobile devices for learning, this improvement was positively correlated with only some of the motivational factors (i.e., mastery goal orientation and intrinsic value) and certain variables (e.g., learners' prior knowledge) in the Framework for the Rational Analysis of Mobile Education used for conceptualising mobile learning. Also, the results of factor analysis suggested three latent factors among all the variables in the model.