Evaluation of new online app wins award at world conference
A paper co-written by Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences PhD student Sohaib Ahmed and Associate Professor David Parsons won the Best Paper Award at the 11th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning held at Helsinki last month.
The paper – Evaluating ‘ThinknLearn’: a Mobile Science Inquiry-Based Learning Application in Practice – focused on the learning experience of Auckland secondary school pupils using a new mobile-web learning application called ‘ThinknLearn’. Dr Pasons says students used the app to answer multi-choice questions taken from the course curriculum to generate hypotheses for their science experiments.
“Winning the award is quite an achievement, as this is the premier conference in this field,” Dr Parsons says.
The app, designed by Mr Ahmed, utilises the abductive form of inquiry-based investigation to help guide students to think about hypothesis formulation, understand the relationships between different variables, and generate meaningful hypotheses from the given data.
“It presents a case for practical science inquiry where learners are engaged in exploring and experimenting in real environments, which could be useful in enhancing both learning performance and cognitive thinking skills,” Mr Ahmed says.
Mr Ahmed came to Massey University to study after he was awarded a Higher Education Commission Scholarship in Pakistan. He completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Information Services in 2010 and then embarked on his PhD. Once he completes his PhD at the end of this month, he will return to Pakistan to continue his research.