Keywords

1 Introduction

“Time for science lessons, take out your phones!” This was the title of the news article published on a national newspaper (The Straits Times, November 22, 2010) on our school-based research study in 1:1 computing for 24/7 (24 h a day, 7 days a week) access to mediate the students’ classroom and out-of-classroom learning. The title aptly captures the essence of the changes our study had brought to the Primary 3–4 (3rd–4th Grade) experimental classes after two years of design and enactment of a mobilized curriculum (Norris and Soloway 2008). By “mobilized curriculum,” we refer to a curriculum that starts with the existing specification of content structure and learning goals, but then is transformed to incorporate the mediation of mobile technologies’ affordances. The “mobilized curriculum” is a transformation from a more content- and teacher-centered classroom practice to the provision of a student-centered, cross-contextual learning experience to foster personalized, self-directed, and authentic learning (Looi et al. 2009; Zhang et al. 2010). Authentic learning comes about as learning that is seamlessly integrated or implanted into meaningful, “real-life” situations (Jonassen et al. 2008).

This work concurs with Van T’ Hooft and Swan’s (2004) vision that ubiquitous technology has become integrated into the curriculum so that the students no longer have to fight over whose turn it is to use one of the few desktops in the classrooms. In addition, 1:1 computing for 24/7 access can extend student learning beyond the four walls of the classrooms, with the mobile devices functioning as a personal “learning hub” (Wong 2012; Wong and Looi, 2010) that facilitates personalized learning journeys for each student. Therefore, it is not surprising that such “1:1, 24/7 programs” have been experimented or enacted at K-16 levels in many parts of the world in the past entire decade (e.g., Anastopoulou et al. 2012; Cochrane and Bateman 2010; Kerawalla et al. 2007; Zheng et al. 2014).

Despite extensive academic publications in this topic, Bebell (2005), Dunleavy et al. (2007), and Lei and Zhao (2008) noted that most studies provided only general, descriptive reporting or evaluations on “what” (tools or affordances) was used, “how much” was used, and the changes to “what” and “how much,” and they relied heavily on interviews and observations as their data sources (e.g., Cochrane and Bateman 2010; Crompton and Keane 2012; Hartnell-Young and Heym 2008). Other studies looked into proposing specific theory-based learning models to inform curriculum mobilization (e.g., Cobcroft 2006; Mezler et al. 2007; Moura and Carvalho 2008), performing needs analysis through teacher surveys (e.g., Shuib et al. 2010), discussing what and how emergent technologies can be incorporated into mobilized curriculum (e.g., Bunce 2010; Myers and Talley 2007), developing their own technologies for specific purposes (e.g., Liu and Chu 2010; Wang et al. 2009), developing survey instruments for assessing such programs (e.g., Lauricella and Kay 2010), and studying student and/or teacher perceptions on such programs (e.g., Christensen and Williams 2015; Zheng et al. 2014). Nevertheless, the actual process of curriculum (re-)design and the evaluation of such mobilized curricula remain a research gap.

We believe that a key reason is that most scholars in the fields of science education or learning sciences do not position themselves as curriculum designers in their embedded or interventional studies. They usually came into the K-16 institutions either as researchers designing a specific, often episodic, intervention, or as external assessors of existing programs, or as the developers of higher-level design frameworks or technological infrastructures, while teachers or curriculum designers took up the responsibilities of developing the whole curricula, with or without researchers’ guidance. A notable exception is the project-based inquiry science for middle school which developed a comprehensive 3-year project-based inquiry science curriculum for middle school (National Research Council 2010).

Albeit fairly receptive to technology-mediated instruction, teachers designing new curricula might not necessarily possess deep understanding of the critical success factors behind the technology-enabled intervention. Furthermore, much of the professional development of the 1:1 initiatives they had been through tended to focus on the training of technological affordances but not so much on their epistemological beliefs and the capability of adapting and sustaining mobilized curricula (e.g., Silvernail and Lane 2004).

Our critical analysis of the classroom mobilized activities as reported by the reviewed papers reveals that most of the reported efforts were not genuinely holistic curriculum re-designs. Instead, the mobilized lessons were in general the “plugging in” of mobile technology usage, such as the change of medium (from paper-based to digital learning tasks, or from printed textbooks to digital learning materials), behaviorist quizzes or assessments, additional requirements of Internet searches, etc. In most cases, there was no fundamental change in the classroom practice other than digitalizing certain aspects of the teaching and learning processes, thus lacking authenticity in the learning process, which had perhaps reflected the relatively weak theoretical foundation behind their learning designs.

Conversely, some interventional studies (e.g., Evans and Johri 2008; Martin and Ertzberger 2013; Santos et al. 2014) may have developed m-learning models for 1:1 initiatives with good pedagogical and theoretical grounds such as project/inquiry-based learning, constructivist learning, situated learning, and collaborative learning. However, exactly how the introduction of these models had impacted the re-design and enactment of the existing curricula, and whether and how subsequent classroom practices were transformed were often not clearly reported. These could be attributed to the gap between educational research and practice, as posited by Sabelli and Dede (2001).

The questions we are interested in are: In 1:1 initiatives, to what level are the changes in classroom practices acceptable by both the formal school establishment (e.g., not to jeopardize the students’ pursuance of the learning goals and academic standards imposed by the authorities) and the researchers with the agenda of advocating pedagogical reform? As abrupt changes are usually not feasible, how should gradual reforms take place? As researchers, how should we manage the school leaders’ and teachers’ expectations in striking a balance among different agendas and needs?

In this regard, and under the auspices of the three-year SEAMLESS project (Zhang et al. 2010; Looi et al. 2011) on 1:1 computing at the primary school level, we transformed the existing science curriculum for Primary 3–4 (P3 and P4) into a mobilized curriculum. The project is known as SEAMLESS as it is framed in the broader context of constructing “seamless learning” environments to bridge different learning contexts, mediated by mobile devices in 1:1, 24/7 basis (Chan et al. 2006; Milrad et al. 2013; Wong et al. 2015). Distilled from our team’s literature review and prior research findings, we developed a ten-dimensional framework known as “10D-MSL” to characterize mobile-assisted seamless learning (Wong, 2012; Wong and Looi 2011). The ten dimensions are:

  • Encompassing formal and informal learning

  • Encompassing individual and social learning

  • Learning across time

  • Learning across locations

  • Ubiquitous access to learning resources (online information, teacher-supplied materials, student artifacts, student online interactions, etc.)

  • Encompassing physical and digital worlds

  • Combined usage of multiple device types

  • Seamless and rapid switching between multiple learning tasks

  • Knowledge synthesis (prior and new knowledge, multiple levels of thinking skills, and/or cross-disciplinary learning)

  • Encompassing multiple pedagogical or learning models (facilitated by the teachers)

Thus, seamless learning could simply be characterized as “seamless flow of learning across contexts.” The basic rationale is that it is not feasible to equip students with all the skills and knowledge they need for lifelong learning solely through formal learning (or any one specific learning context). Henceforth, student learning should move beyond the acquisition of content knowledge to develop the capacity to learn seamlessly (Chen et al. 2010).

The mobilized curriculum is expected to address learning objectives in the existing curriculum that follows the existing curriculum schedule and yet affords the possibilities for deeper learning and engagement in science, and personalized learning across contexts (Looi et al. 2011; Song et al. 2012). The design of the curriculum resonates with several of the design elements of the authentic learning experience, namely real-world relevance; sustained investigation; multiple sources and perspectives; collaboration; reflection (meta-cognition); interdisciplinary perspective; integrated assessment; polished products; and multiple interpretations and outcomes (Lombardi 2007).

In this chapter, we will evaluate four representative mobilized units arising from the curriculum that we co-designed and enacted in order to illuminate the detailed design process of activities for classroom and out-of-classroom learning. For this purpose, we adapted and applied a framework proposed by Frohberg et al. (2009).

We will also describe how the school management’s involvement in the end of the first-year lesson enactment had impacted our subsequent curriculum design, which exemplified the often inevitable tension between research and practice (Wong et al. 2011). We will discuss implications and lessons learned for guiding subsequent work. Our curriculum design was done simultaneously, iteratively, and collaboratively with the teachers. As our mobilized curriculum was not a direct output from a pure academic-driven design exercise, we step aside from the role of practice-minded co-designers to evaluate individual lesson plans (both in terms of their design and some notable outcomes in the enactment) through an academic lens. In doing so, we wish to contribute to the literature on how to address challenges in translating learning theories and in integrating mobile technology affordances into curriculum development and sustainable classroom practices.

2 Context of Curriculum Design Process

We collaborated with a Singapore primary school to explore a sustainable model for integrating 1:1 mobile technology into student-centered, inquiry-based learning. In our three-year collaboration, we first studied the existing national science curriculum (Ministry of Education 2008) and learned about its overarching vision, “Knowledge through Inquiry,” and its adoption of the BSCS (Biological Sciences Curriculum Study) 5E model (Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, Evaluate) (Bybee 2002) as the guiding structure in inquiry lesson design. Besides the state-authorized science textbooks, there are complementary student activity books (workbooks) that contain assignment questions for students to complete at various points of each lesson. In the curriculum design and classroom practices prior to our intervention, it was mandatory for the students to complete most of the prescribed activities. The activity book assignments are rather structured and typically comprise exercises that require students to recall knowledge rather than carry out inquiry activities. Nonetheless, the school management viewed it as a critical tool to ensure the students learn how to answer examination-style questions.

In the first year, we followed a Primary 3 (10-year-old students) mixed-achievement class of 30 students to first observe and understand the existing teaching and learning practices. A curriculum task force involving teachers and researchers met weekly to develop a methodology for designing the mobilized science curriculum. Such an approach is known as collaborative inquiry (Darling-Hammond 1996), based on the notion that collaboration between research and practice is likely to advance both knowledge and action (Batliwala 2003). Hence, collaborative inquiry could serve as a means of teacher empowerment and professional development, aided by researchers’ consultations and support, in leading them to take charge of their own growth and to resolve their own problems (Keedy et al. 1999; Walter and Gerson 2007; Wong et al. 2011).

The outcomes were the specifications of a series of mobilized lessons, known as MLE (mobile learning environment) units in our project. Each unit was based on one overarching goal that pertains to one topic or encompasses several topics in the original curriculum (though not necessarily following the original instructional sequence) and spanning through a period of one to five weeks in enactment. Each unit consists of a series of learning activities, some of which may be carried out during the formal science lessons in the classroom, out-of-class (but at designated time, such as field trips or during recess time), and out-of-school (at students’ own time when they are back at home or in their neighborhoods). The activities may or may not involve the use of their smartphones. The curriculum co-design was an ongoing process. That is, the task force did not design the whole science curriculum in one go before the intervention commenced. During and after each design-enactment cycle for a MLE unit, the teachers and researchers were able to reflect upon the lessons and apply such understanding to inform the design of the next MLE unit.

The research work also involved the pilot testing of the co-design curriculum units in classroom settings. In the second year, we continued working with the curriculum task force and the experimental class which has moved up to Primary 4. We also spread the intervention to another high-ability Primary 4 class taught by another young teacher. Both classes deployed the same mobilized curriculum.

For the intervention, each of the students in the experimental class was assigned a HTC™ TyTN II smartphone which runs the Microsoft™ Windows Mobile 6 for 24/7 access. The school purchased the smartphone with an unlimited 3G data plan for the students. The smartphone was equipped with a digital camera and with the bundled software of calculator, calendar, MS™ Mobile Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Besides these standard affordances and software, students and teachers needed explicit software support for the inquiry learning approach. For this, the GoKnow™ MLE (mobile learning environment) was selected. It served as a malleable environment to support the specific inquiry-based teaching and learning strategies in our curriculum design. The software suite consists of PiCoMap (for concept mapping), Sketchy (for production of simple animations, either with a set of freehand sketches or photographs), KWL (a word processing template software for filling up “What do I already Know? What do I Want to know? What have I Learned?”—to stimulate students’ curiosity), and GoManage server (for teachers to perform learning management and automated backup of student artifacts). In the second year of the intervention, two additional software tools were developed at different stages: Mobile Forum (a mobile-optimized online forum) and ColInq (“collaborative inquiry,” affording students to upload and share geo-tagged text and multimedia artifacts either during teacher-facilitated field trips or on their own during their informal learning).

We designed our mobilized curriculum to be student-centered, inquiry-based, and collaborative in nature. With the use of the smartphone as a learning hub to integrate formal and informal learning activities, each student created and maintained a broad range of artifacts associated with each curriculum unit. In the curriculum design, we applied the following six guidelines with consideration of foregrounding an inquiry science approach and the affordances of the mobile technologies:

  • Design student-centered inquiry-based learning activities (learning);

  • Exploit the affordances of mobile technologies to be woven into the fabric of the learning activities (technology);

  • Assess student learning formatively by teacher and peer evaluations of student artifacts during and after class (assessment);

  • Facilitate collaborative interactions among students through and over the hand devices (collaboration);

  • Make use of community support and resources, such as field trips to the local zoo and the science center (community resources);

  • Support teacher development to be good developers and facilitators, which was achieved through the collaborative inquiry process (teacher’s professional development).

The designed MLE units were packaged into GoKnow’s MLE MyProjects, which could be accessed by the students on their smartphones as shown in Fig. 1. A lesson overview depicted in Fig. 2 shows students the objectives of the lesson and what is expected from them in learning about the body system.

Fig. 1
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Screenshot of body systems. MLE unit

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Fig. 2
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Overview of body systems lesson on the MLE as seen by the students

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We designed a total of twelve MLE units in the two years of intervention. In addition to offering a logical flow for learning the subject matter knowledge, we had progressively incorporated various types of inquiry/seamless learning activities, from simpler to more demanding ones. This was to facilitate the students’ gradual changes in their habits of mind moving toward learning seamlessly and learning by inquiry. We provide a categorization of the 10 major types of smartphone-mediated activities in Table 1 (with activity ID’s to be used in the subsequent tables in this chapter). Table 2 summarizes the essential information, including what smartphone-mediated activities were incorporated, of the twelve MLE lessons.

Table 1 Types of mobile-assisted activities incorporated in the MLE curriculum
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Table 2 List of MLE units designed for the mobilized curriculum (* denotes units that will be further evaluated below)
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3 Analytical Framework for Evaluating Curriculum Design

As stated before, the collaborative inquiry approach was adopted in the mobilized curriculum co-design not only for teachers’ professional development but also for designing a curriculum that is rooted in the theoretical foundations of seamless learning, inquiry-based learning, and self-directed and collaborative learning. In co-designing the curriculum, we took into consideration the constraints posed by the context we worked with, such as the students’ ability levels, resource limitations, the culture of the school establishment, and the national mandated science curriculum standards. Throughout the collaborative inquiry, the researchers refrained from dictating the design and were willing to listen to the teachers’ voices to engage them in a process of co-design. As the BSCS 5E model is not inconsistent with our seamless and inquiry-based learning framework, it was retained to structure the lesson plans, as it is what the teachers are familiar with. The learning activities were substantially re-designed, steered by the six curriculum mobilization guidelines stated in the previous section. Taking into consideration the different individual topics and other factors, the actual learning activities varied from one lesson to another. For example, we introduced parental involvement for the “body system” topic and the Jigsaw collaborative approach for the “magnet” topic.

We searched for such mobile learning evaluation framework in the literature that we could use for evaluating our curriculum design. Two relevant papers were found: Dunleavy et al. (2007) and Sharples (2009). In his paper, Sharples (2009) outlined three major aspects to evaluate a mobile learning activity: usability, effectiveness, and satisfaction, but did not provide a concrete methodology to guide evaluation work. Conversely, Dunleavy et al. (2007) evaluated a variety of 1:1 classroom learning activities practiced by two middle schools using Bransford et al. (2000) four essential design principles of effective learning environments as their basis: learner-centered, knowledge-centered, assessment-centered, and community-centered. They presented their findings by categorizing and providing “scattered” examples of learning activities pertaining to each design principle. We argue that such an evaluation method is relatively coarse-grained and is more descriptive than analytic.

Instead, we adopted the framework of Frohberg et al. (2009) which was originally developed for their critical analysis of 102 mobile learning projects. Rooted in the task model for mobile learners (Sharples et al. 2007; Taylor et al. 2006) which was expanded from activity theory (Engeström 1987), Frohberg et al. derived a rubric-like method to evaluate six factors (namely the context, tools, control, communication, objective, and subject) of each reviewed project. Each factor has a scale of one to five, with the bigger value denoting being more desirable (as they require higher-order thinking) under normal circumstances. They used the framework to analyze the core pedagogical designs of individual projects. We will instead employ it to analyze the mobile learning components of our various MLE unit designs (see Table 3). This multidimensional framework is intended to capture the richness of the emerging mobile learning research arena and help one “to discover common ground and similarities, along with differences, inconsistencies or contradictions within the domain of mobile learning” (p. 308). We believe the framework would assist us in similar ways in comparing and contrasting the MLE lessons.

Table 3 The evaluation framework of the MLE units of the SEAMLESS project (adapted from Frohberg et al. (2009), p. 312)
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The six factors as proposed by Frohberg et al. (2009) were the outcome of their higher-level analysis of a more diversified set of mobile learning designs, which cannot be directly applied to analyze our MLE lessons without any adaptation. We will not assess our MLE units in the “subject” aspect as it is originally meant for characterizing the target learners (in particular, their prior knowledge levels, from novice to expert) of individual studies—our “subject” was always the same class of students (subject = 1, i.e., novice) and did not vary from lesson to lesson.

Another particular factor that we adapted is the tool factor, as some of the m-learning activities incorporated into our lesson units do not fit into any of the five types of pedagogical roles that the factor originally describes. In essence, Frohberg et al. way of distinguishing the pedagogical roles was relatively physical context-oriented, where “tools = 1 and 2” are referring to learning activities unrelated to the physical context, while “tools = 3, 4, and 5” are activities situated in the physical environment, which essentially overlaps with “context =4 (physical context).” We re-scoped the last three roles by generalizing them to include content-based or cyberspace-based activities as long as they either serve “guided reflection” (e.g., KWL activities [scaffolded individual reflection] and mobile forum [reflection triggered by peer negotiation of meaning]), “reflective data collection” (e.g., Internet search of data or information to assist subsequent learning activities), or “content creation” (e.g., creation of Sketchy animations).

4 Analysis of MLE Units and Lessons

In the next two sections, we will present and evaluate four of the MLE units that we co-designed with the teachers. The selected units demonstrate the diversity in the range of mobilized learning activities and illuminate our overall curriculum design both in terms of the content to cover and the inquiry/seamless learning skills to foster in the students. The selected units are: plants and their parts, and body systems (for year one); and heat and temperature, and interactions [magnet] (for year two). We will feature a summary of the flow of each unit in a figure, with smartphone-mediated activities in italics.

For the purpose of empirical study, we collected a variety set of data throughout the intervention period, namely (1) field notes, video, and audio recording of the MLE classes and taskforce meetings; (2) pre-, interim, and post-questionnaires; (3) pre-, interim, and post-interviews with six students with varied academic achievements and with the school management and participating teachers; (4) pre-, interim, and post-tests; (5) students’ paper-and-pen-based and digital artifacts; (6) student–student and teacher–student online interactions; (7) students’ school examination results. As the focus of this chapter is on implementation research with an emphasis on the evaluation of MLE unit design, we will not go into detailed analysis of student learning processes and outcomes which have been reported elsewhere (Looi et al. 2011; Looi et al. 2015). Rather, we will focus on analyzing the design as well as narrating some key findings in the MLE unit enactment with the aid of examples of student work.

4.1 MLE Curriculum: Year 1 (Primary 3)

4.1.1 Brief Description of Units P3-1 and P3-2: Progressive Introduction to Mobile-Assisted Seamless Learning

In Unit P3-1 (classification of living and non-living things), we adhered to the 5E model learning flow but confined the learning to within the classroom. We started with a simple use of the smartphone (to create simple animations with Sketchy). The students were trained in using and handling the phones in the midst of Unit P3-1. However, it was not until Unit P3-2 where students were given the chance for the first time to bring their phones home over two weekends to carry out some designated activities (see below), and they were instructed to return the phones to the school on subsequent Mondays. At this early stage, the highly constrained access to the phones became a teaser to warm the students up toward future student-centered learning. It was also part of the enculturation process for the teachers in changing her instructional approaches. As the students became familiar with using handling their phones beyond the school compound during the first two weekends, they retained the handhelds 24 × 7 till the end of the two-year program.

This unit started off with a relatively conventional classroom session where the teacher led a discussion on classification of animals using a PowerPoint presentation and a Web site. She then tasked each student to fill in his or her KWL on the smartphone for the first time at home. The KWL activity was intended to provide a means to scaffold them in setting and reflecting upon their learning goals throughout their seamless learning experience (with the interplay of formal and informal settings) in this unit. The students also used the smartphone to create Sketchy animations to demonstrate their prior understanding of the unique characteristics of individual animal categories. They were asked to update their Sketchy animations as the lessons developed and as they developed their understanding of the categorization of animals. Through GoManage, the teacher was able to progressively monitor the students’ progress and artifacts. As a form of formative assessment, selected student artifacts from all these of smartphone-mediated activities were presented and discussed in the class at different points of time.

At this early stage of the two-year intervention, the handhelds were used for note taking and for students’ representation of their ideas. In particular, the Sketchy application afforded them the generation of animated artifacts that was not possible on paper. Such animations have the affordance of making the students’ thinking and creating process visible to the teacher. This enabled the teacher to check the students’ understanding and to intervene, when necessary, in the students’ knowledge construction processes. Still, in essence, the affordances of personalization and mobility had not yet been prominently exploited. The overall design of this lesson was largely oriented toward textbook content rather than toward the students’ day-to-day living context. It was a gentle start to get the students acquainted with the devices as their “learning hub” and not to rush the students into more advanced m-learning activities. More subtly, the lesson empowered students with content creation and in the absence of prescribed textbook and activity books, students could practice constructing their own knowledge. The students also swapped their phones with their adjacent peers in the class to view and comment on each other’s work.

4.1.2 Evaluation of Unit P3-4: Plants and Their Parts—Enculturating Learners to Generate Artifacts

Prior to this unit, students learned about the basic characteristics of plants in Unit P3-3 (Plants). Apart from maintaining their KWL pertaining to the unit, they were required to take pictures of different edible plant parts (e.g., potato (stem), carrot (root), and tomato (fruit)) at home. This was the first time the teacher tasked the students to extend their seamless learning experiences into their daily lives, i.e., a preliminary attempt to bring contextual/authentic elements into their learning. This helps students to be aware that plants are not just the trees and bushes they see along the road, but can also take the form of vegetables they are eating. The teacher then facilitated a sharing, discussion, and classification exercise using the photographs taken and assisted the students in identifying misconceptions such as the classification of the potato as being the fruit of the plant. Another “first time” for the student was to create a PiCoMap to organize their conceptual understanding from what they collated from their research.

Unit P3-4 extends the preceding unit with the aim of deepening the learning of plant parts as well as understanding the concept of “diversity.” Figure 3 depicts the learning flow design of Unit P3-4. The students’ inquiry process started with them conducting Internet research to find out the functionalities of various parts of plants. The italicized descriptions of activities in Fig. 3 (as well as in Figs. 6, 7, and 9) denote activities that utilize the smartphones. Figure 4 shows a student searching and identifying a relevant educational video clip on the web. She watched it and then filled in a teacher-supplied table. After they had gained some basic understanding, they were encouraged to take pictures of different parts of the plants they encountered at their neighborhood. We consider such an activity form a means of triggering their observational and reflective habits of mind during their daily encounters, which can lead them to associate their findings in such informal learning spaces with what they have learned in their formal classes. The students then posted the photographs onto their blogs to trigger peer discussions for comparing different types of roots, leaves, and stems.

Fig. 3
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The flow of Unit P3-4: “Plant and their parts”

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Fig. 4
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A student conducting Internet research on parts of plants

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Table 4 depicts our evaluation of the mobile-assisted learning activities in this lesson. KWL, animation creation, and concept mapping are situated in the independent context (context = 1, as students carried out these activities at their own time) with scaffolded control (control = 3). How do we characterize the communication aspect of the activities? It can be attributed to “isolated learners” (communication = 1) because the students first carried out the activities individually with their handhelds, but it may also be “cooperation” (=5) because the entire class was then involved in discussing their artifacts arising from the three activities (“communication or collaborative learning over, not through, the device”). We decided to rate them with 5 as we believe that the activity designs should be assessed as a whole rather than in terms of when and how the mobile devices were used.

Table 4 Evaluation of the mobile-assisted activities in Unit P3-4
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The photograph-taking activity marked a major departure from the relatively formally structured learning designs in the previous lessons. Most of the teacher-facilitated, episodic learning trails reported in the literature tended to deploy structured learning activity designs and were situated within a relatively controlled physical environment (e.g., Kamarainen et al. 2013; Shih et al. 2010; Shear et al. 2014; Spikol and Milrad 2008). Such trials took place within a designated time slot and location and often with teacher pre-specified objects that the students need to search for and identify, or even with a relatively linear physical path for the students to move about. Instead, our photograph-taking activity gave students greater control (control = 4) in the sense that it was a learning experience that was genuinely blended into their daily lives. This was achieved by carrying out reflective data collection (tool = 4) that enabled them to apply (objective = 3) their classroom-learned knowledge of plant parts to observe perhaps unfamiliar plants that they encounter, in this virtually borderless physical world (context = 4), and appropriating their encounters to mediate their learning (Wong et al. 2012).

The follow-up blog-based sharing and discussion was a meaningful post-activity after photograph taking. Wong et al. (2010) cite several similar m-learning studies that required learners to take photographs in their daily life and argue that such learning designs treat the learner-created content as the end, which would then become static learning materials accessible by their peers. They advocate using such authentic materials as the means to extend such m-learning activities from personal to social meaning making, i.e., to make use of the stated learner artifacts to mediate subsequent discussions. The photograph-taking–sharing–discussion subprocess in P3-4 is congruent with this principle. It is therefore a mainly learner controlled (control = 4), cooperative (communication = 5), analytical (objective = 4), and guided-reflective (tool = 3) activity that is situated in the socializing context (context = 5). The students’ learning gains through these seamless learning activities were evident in the PiCoMap artifacts that they created by the end of the unit. Figure 5 depicts one such student artifact that demonstrates her good understanding of the unit topic.

Fig. 5
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A student’s PiCoMap created by the end of Unit P3-4

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While some students chose to show their understanding through PiCoMap, others made use of Sketchy. This was one of the MLE lesson designs that provide a showcase of multilearning and assessment modalities.

4.1.3 Brief Description of P3-5 and P3-6—Magnifying Authentic Learning

The design of the next two units (P3-5 and P3-6) employed similar learning flows. Both lessons incorporated the KWL activity, photograph taking, online discussion, Sketchy animation creation, and concept mapping. In particular, for P3-5 (fungi), we facilitated the “fungi detective” activity by getting the students to identify and take photographs of fungi in their living environments found at home and in the neighborhoods. The teacher then flashed selected photographs and facilitated a classroom discussion to help the students see that fungi could be both useful and harmful. Likewise, in P3-6 (materials), the students were required to identify and take photographs of “objects that are strong, soft, float on water and are not transparent.” They then created Sketchy animations to label the material and indicate the purpose of the object.

In addition, we arranged for the first field trip to a probiotic drink factory in the midst of P3-5 for them to learn about the presence of good bacteria in a drink commonly known to them and how the bacteria travel through their digestive system. In the trip, a learning connection was made between the concepts of bacteria being a living microorganism and how the organs in the digestive system function in a human body system. They might also relate this to their experiences of stomach disorders when they eat contaminated food.

4.1.4 Evaluation of Unit P3-7: The Body System—Bringing in Parental Involvement

One important principle in learning activity design is to incorporate the right activities to the right topic to facilitate student learning, by taking the nature of the topic into consideration. Much as we saw the potential impact to student learning in daily photograph-taking activities that we facilitated in the last three MLE units, it was not necessarily suitable for the learning of all science topics. For Unit P3-7 on the topic of “the body system,” instead of stimulating the students to actively observe and make sense of their surroundings, the students could learn the topic by making sense of their own bodies.

In this regard, we designed for the involvement of the people who were closest to the students—their parents—in this MLE unit. Apart from the usual web research, KWL, Sketchy, and group video-making activities, parents were involved in two stages of the learning flow. First, the parents used the handhelds to video record the students carrying out the chew and swallow experiment, which was more of a logistic arrangement (since it was difficult for the students to video record their own actions) as well as giving parents the first “taste” of being involved in their children’s MLE learning process. Second, they participated in the culminating activity of the lesson, “teach-your-parents.” The students were tasked to ask the parents what they knew about the digestive system and to identify gaps in their parents’ knowledge. They had to teach the parents what they thought the parents did not know and to interview their parents again to check their understanding. All the parent–child interactions were video- or voice recorded with the smartphone. Back in the classroom, each student shared the recording with a peer by swapping their smartphone, and together they discussed and reflected on their own understanding of the digestive system. In turn, misconceptions were surfaced and challenged. A dissection of a student’s conversation with a teacher in the classroom is presented below.

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The background of this interview was that the student Larry (a pseudonym) approached a researcher and defended his father when his peer said that his father was not able explain the whole digestive system well. He explained that he did not teach his father the functions of the large intestine and rectum because he thought he only had to cover digestion. Since digestion stops at the small intestine, he did not include the other two organs. When Larry watched the video recording of his father, he realized that he should also include the large intestine and rectum so as to make the digestion system complete. In this process, his understanding for digestive system was refined. Learning became a meaningful process, not just about rote memory.

Figure 6 and Table 5 depict the learning flow design and our evaluation of the design of Lesson P3-4, respectively.

Fig. 6
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The flow of Unit P3-7: “The body systems”

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Table 5 Evaluation of the mobile-assisted activities in Unit P3-7
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As listed in Table 4, we have consistently rated some of the now-standard MLE activities (KWL, Sketchy) as in previous lessons (e.g., context = 1, tool = 3 or 5, control = 2 or 3, communication = 4 or 5, objective = 2). One variation is the individual web search activity. We characterized it as “reflective data collection” (4) for its “tool” factor, which is different from its original definition in Frohberg et al.’s framework—their “data collection” is specifically referring to collecting data in the physical reality, such as measuring temperature or photograph taking, while we consider web search as another form of data collection. Indeed, this form of data collection is not so much an exploitation of the handhelds’ mobility in the physical reality. Still, it was an integral part of the MLE lesson that took place before KWL and perhaps helped the students to shape their “K” and “W.”

The “teach-your-parents” activity was a greater departure from our previous MLE lesson design, as it pushed the context boundary from formalized to socializing (context = 5). The socializing context of mobile learning refers to social learning that either involves people within or beyond the students’ class community—in our case, it is the student family. We have also characterized its communication mode as tight coupling (3) where it actually involves two coupling—student–parent communication at home for students’ “learning by teaching” and in-class student–student communication for peer evaluation on the learning outcomes of each other’s parent.

4.1.5 The School Management’s Feedback at the End of Our Year 1 Intervention

By the end of our year 1 intervention with seven MLE units being enacted, we analyzed the summative science examination scores of all the classes. Our analysis showed that the experimental class students performed better in their semestral science examination as compared to five other mixed-ability classes in the same level who undertook the traditional science lessons (see: (Looi et al. 2011) for more details).

Nevertheless, during the review meetings, the Head of Science Department raised her concern that certain prescribed activities in the Primary 3 activity book, such as assignments with examination-style questions, were not incorporated into the MLE units. She expressed her view that the parents would expect these activities to be completed by the students. The teachers in the task force also shared that, from their past experiences, they did not have enough curriculum time to complete the Primary 4 prescribed activities. They were concerned that if the activities were not covered like the traditional classroom, their students might lack the practice for similar questions in the examinations. There was not enough time to run the mobilized curriculum lessons and such school prescribed activities in parallel. To address the school management and teachers’ concerns, we decided to incorporate these workbook activities into the Primary 4 MLE design. This, in turn, restricted the design of the Primary 4 MLE units, and as a result, a more structured and summative-assessment-oriented Primary 4 MLE was produced.

4.2 MLE Curriculum: Year 2 (Primary 4)

4.2.1 Brief Description of Unit P4-1: Cycles

In designing this first MLE unit for Year 2, we incorporated the highly structured workbook activities as a response to the school management’s concerns and the teachers’ perception of the time constraint. Still, we injected three new elements, namely a farm trip, the growth of spinach using hydroponics method and rearing of caterpillars, and the mobile forum, to the learning flow design to make it as lively and contextualized as possible. We facilitated a farm trip for the students to investigate how various types of vegetables were grown using hydroponics. There was also a butterfly enclosure for the students to observe a variety of butterflies and their eggs, caterpillars, and chrysalises in the midst of the flowers and plants. With their phones, the students took photographs and videos of any object that raised their interest, and took audio notes of any ideas that came into their mind with the voice recording feature, as well as answered a series of science- and mathematics-related questions. Using the farm physical environment as a backdrop, they were also given a problem-solving activity and were tasked to improve the composition which they had planned in school. Many students went home with seeds which they can cultivate using hydroponics method and caterpillars which they can rear in a special container provided by the farm. In turn, they observed and recorded the life cycles. They consolidated the collected data in their Sketchy presentations and brought the spinach back to the class for sale to the teachers and other students in the school. We then launched the mobile forum for students to extend their social meaning making and collective reflection on the topic beyond the course of the unit.

4.2.2 Evaluation of Unit P4-4: Heat and Temperature—Sidelining Mobile Learning Activities

We picked Unit P4-4 as an exemplary unit of P4-2, P4-3, and P4-4 to analyze. This set of units reflects how we addressed the school management’s concerns that they raised at the end of the previous year by designing learning activities that focus more on getting students to answer workbook-type questions correctly than encouraging seamless, inquiry learning. In these units, we still facilitated the students to conduct KWL, Sketchy, and/or concept mapping activities (different combinations of activities in different units). However, these mobilized activities had been sidelined. Our six guidelines for mobilized curriculum design were almost abandoned. For example, we arranged for workbook activities to conclude each of these lessons, unlike that in our previous design where the more open-ended, personalized concept mapping or the “L” of KWL was carried out to summarize or synthesize student learning. Group inquiry activities were implemented in these three units, but they relied less on the smartphone (mostly used for web information search within groups).

Figure 7 and Table 6 depict the learning flow design and our evaluation of the design of Unit P4-4, respectively.

Fig. 7
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The flow of Unit P4-4: “Heat and temperature”

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Table 6 Evaluation of the mobile-assisted activities in Unit P4-4
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From Table 6, our ratings on the (only) two mobilized activities in Unit P4-4 seem to be similar to that of our P3 lesson designs. By reviewing the overall lesson design, however, we recognize how our original goals for the curriculum design exercise, in particular, the nurturing of seamless learning and inquiry learning with a sensible exploitation of the technological affordances were debilitated.

As a result of sidelining mobile learning activities, through the quality and quantity of KWL attempted (see: Sha et al. 2012), we observed that in comparison with the lessons where mobilized activities were central, students’ motivation in learning plummeted in unit P4-4. We compared the KWL attempted by the students in P4-4 and P4-5 (see the next section—with a more dynamic learning process than P4-4). It was observed that other than the increase in amount of items reflected in P4-5 than in P4-4, the students reflected more upon their learning more in two major aspects. Firstly, the students asked themselves authentic questions that were not found in the textbook and experiences that were not part of the lesson in class. Secondly, the students reflected beyond discussion points that arose during class activities. Examples of the KWL can be seen in Fig. 8.

Fig. 8
figure 8

Example of student’s KWL

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4.2.3 Unit P4-5 Magnet—Back to a More Holistic Seamless Learning Experience

The design of Lesson P4-5 marked the return of our more dynamic and seamless learning design that we practiced in our previous year’s (Primary 3) mobilized units. By incorporating a new Web 2.0 tool, ColInq, students can create artifacts (like taking photographs or videos) on the fly with geo-tagging and add annotations which can be shared and built upon by other students. We brought back out-of-school, personalized inquiry activities by getting the students to experiment using magnets to test on different objects that they encounter in their daily lives, take photographs or videos, or figure out inquiry questions, and post these artifacts onto ColInq for sharing and discussions. Back in the class, the teacher made use of selected student artifacts posted on ColInq to get the class to infer magnetic and non-magnetic objects. The students were also allowed to bring their magnet making experiments (and even “magic shows”) home so that they could work with their parents. Their experiments were recorded and brought back to the classroom for further discussion.

Figure 9 and Table 7 depict the learning flow design and our evaluation of the design of Unit P4-4, respectively.

Fig. 9
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The flow of Unit P4-5: “Magnet”

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Table 7 Evaluation of the mobile-assisted activities in Unit P4-5
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In P4-5, the use of the mobile phones reverted to a personal tool for research and data collection. The focus is on construction of knowledge and extension of classroom activities. The class activities evoked students’ curiosity and enabled them to further challenge their understanding of the underlying concepts of how a magnet works. Instead of assigning students inquiry questions like the lesson designs in P4-1 to P4-4 and mandating the way the questions should be answered, the students were tasked to find out how they could design and make magnets.

Figure 10 shows an example of students’ independent research for the activity. Although the students were given the same task, they were free to choose how they wanted to complete the activity. Making choices available in the design encouraged students to explore and extend their learning beyond the scope of textbooks and workbooks.

Fig. 10
figure 10

Student’s independent research on magnets

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5 Discussion

To design a MLE curriculum to enhance, if not replace, the existing curriculum, the required changes encompass threefolded dimensions: curriculum (curricular learning goals), pedagogy, and technology. As the contextual environment (such as the national curriculum and assessment modes) could not be changed within the duration of the intervention study, the emphasis was on re-designing the existing curriculum and facilitating a gradual techno-pedagogical shift. In this way, teachers who are risk-averse might be more willing to take up the curricular innovation. The approach is to strive for evolutions in the classroom practices and the students’ habits of mind in learning, rather than a revolution. If a revolution is to be insisted, our re-designed curriculum might not be able to go beyond the clinical stage of the research since the school leaders may refuse to change the existing science teaching practices drastically to accommodate it.

The intervention project was driven by the key notion of seamless learning, foregrounded by authentic, self-directed, and collaborative inquiry learning in the science curriculum re-design. While the science curriculum design adopts the BSCS 5E model in which the teachers are familiar with, we retrospectively observe an emergent pattern of systematically introducing various types of MLE learning activities to nurture dispositions in the cross-context student learning across our design-enactment-reflection-refinement cycles of MLE curriculum development. This was a result of the taskforce’s continuous dialogues and reflections on the curriculum design that integrates subject content, the technological affordances, and the progression of student learning. The parallel progression of researchers’ literature review, research design, and formative evaluation of research and researcher-teacher co-design, enactment, and formative evaluation of curriculum development ensured the timely responses to the day-to-day demands from both teaching and research.

The students started their learning journey by creating their own conceptual representations with the smartphone (Sketchy animations from Unit P3-1 onward). This was followed by reinforcing students’ self-regulation in science learning (KWL), from Unit P3-2 onward. Then, in Unit P3-3, the intervention introduced the out-of-school, highly open-ended photograph-taking activity where students needed to be observant at their daily encounters and associate those with their learned knowledge in the class, thus achieving seamless learning. In addition, concept mapping activities (with PiCoMap) were adopted as a means of concluding each MLE unit by getting the students to consolidate their learning. Unit P3-5 saw the enactment of a cross-topic field trip to study how the relatively popular (within the m-learning community) “social reflective data collection” approach could fit into our MLE curriculum. In Unit P3-7, student–parent interactions in the learning design were introduced and incorporated into the approaches of “learning by teaching” and peer reviews (of each other’s parent) to reinforce students’ social learning and reflective learning. Unit P4-1 brought in another field trip and facilitated follow-up activities such as water spinach and caterpillar growing, and mobile forum discussions so that the students would carry on deepening and internalizing the situated knowledge that they picked up at the field trip. These activities provide the experiential authentic experiences of students as they are learning continuously across these various settings.

Indeed, through these multifactor evaluations of our learning design, the approach of designing for “mobile devices as learning hubs” for individual students is re-affirmed. Whereas the recent m-learning community has been carrying a popular view that m-learning designs that undermine the mobility affordance (e.g., for situated, context-aware learning) of the mobile devices are inferior designs, our MLE curriculum design that focuses more on exploiting the personalization affordances of the devices has its value and significance—indeed, from a seamless learner’s point of view, the individual herself is the invariant and there needs to be a sense of seamlessness in switching contexts between learning activities (Looi et al. 2013; Wong and Looi 2011). Our notion of “learning hub” advocates the assimilation of mobile devices into individual students’ everyday life experiences by integrating various personal (and collaborative) learning tools, resources, and artifacts at one place. With systematic learning design to nurture their self-directed learning habit, such a “learning hub” would mediate individual students’ complete seamless learning process.

Nevertheless, the turning point was at the end of our first-year intervention, when the school management talked us to make our second-year MLE curriculum design more structured and workbook-driven—to them, it was important to ensure a certain level of coherence in the lesson flow. We practiced what they asked for in Units P4-2, P4-3, and P4-4, and sacrificed the seamlessness in the design.

Subsequently, we observed the students’ motivational level in the MLE curriculum being dropped in the second year. We deduced three possible reasons behind the decline—the change of the learning design, the decline of their handhelds’ performance (the hardware wore off and the Windows OS slowed down), and the diminishing of the novelty effect in the technology. However, as we observed the students’ enthusiasm returned during Unit P4-5 where we brought back almost all types of mobile-assisted learning activities grounded in seamless learning option, it is a plausible inference that the liveliness of the learning design plays an important part in motivating student learning, perhaps more so than the other two factors.

The two-year implementation of the transformed science curriculum for a class for over two school years led to positive learning gains for the students and changes in the teacher’s capacity to teach such a curriculum (Looi et al. 2011). Because of such outcomes, the school decided to scale up the mobilized lessons from one class to all classes in the grade levels of 3 and 4. Thus, the school administration in consultation with parents of the new classes has taken on ownership to continue the seamless learning pedagogy. The participating teachers from the two experimental classes have become curriculum leaders to develop other teachers’ abilities in adopting and adapting the seamless learning practice. Our mobilized curriculum and teacher guidebook also become part of the infrastructure for sustaining the efforts.

The subsequent research efforts focus on adapting and “ruggedizing” the innovation for sustainability to retain substantial efficacy in diverse contexts of all classes in the level (Looi et al. 2015). The MLE curriculum was designed for a mixed-achievement class. Scaling up involves customization of the MLE curriculum for students who are higher ability and for students who are lower ability. Our research also developed an effective model for larger-scale teachers’ professional development for the enactment of MLE curriculum (Looi et al. 2016).

6 Conclusion

To achieve a genuine integration of 1:1, 24/7 m-learning into students’ daily lives, there is a need to revamp school-based curriculum and pedagogies to support sustained authentic learning and foster students’ skills of seamless learning, so that m-learning practices are not just about episodic interventions that may not result in long-term impacts on school practices and students’ habits of mind in learning (Wong et al. 2012). In this chapter, we have narrated our two years’ journey in curriculum mobilization, with the emphasis on evaluating the curriculum design, with valuable experiences gained in continuously improving our socio-techno-pedagogical framework of the seamless learning practice within the school ecology that it was situated in. The curriculum enables authentic learning for the students, learning that is seamlessly integrated or implanted into meaningful, situations that the students experience inside and outside of the classroom.

As a narration of the implementation research trajectory, this chapter describes the cycles of work in designing each curriculum unit iteratively and how the cultural norms and practices of the school posed constraints and challenges to the design and enactment of the curriculum. We use an analytic framework to evaluate selected curriculum units. In doing so, we hope to contribute to the literature by providing more detail on how to translate learning theories and integrate mobile technology affordances into sustainable practices in regard to curriculum development. We encourage more effort in such directions to allow researchers and practitioners to design more sustainable and scalable interventions for education change in schools.