A Comparison of Students' Responses with their Actual Usage of Mobile Learning for High School Mathematics

Recently, we conducted a mobile learning research project in Trinidad and Tobago. The project was conducted to determine if mobile learning can assist high school students in learning mathematics. Our research uses several innovative techniques in an effort to help rectify the problem of high failure rates of mathematics in high schools in the Caribbean. A mobile learning application was developed based on a subset of the mathematics curriculum. Three evaluation studies were conducted with the mobile learning application. Approximately 60 students participated in the studies. They used the mobile application for three weeks. At the end of each study, a questionnaire was used to capture student opinions of the mobile learning application. Questionnaire data is based on student responses and there is no guarantee on how accurately the students responded to the questions. This paper focuses on the responses of the students, who used mobile learning for the first time, and seeks to determine if the usage data can provide any reliability to the questionnaire data. It compares the students' opinions of the mobile learning application with their actual use of the system during the experimental period. It summarizes behavior patterns of the students gleaned from the usage logs of the system and compares this to the students' responses to the questionnaire.