Abstract

This study investigated how students’ and teachers’ pedagogical roles in mobile learning moderated the relationship between high school students’ perceived usefulness of mobile technology and the actual use frequency, as well as how students’ perceived usefulness impacted their physics learning achievement. We examined 803 high school freshmen who used 20 specific functions of tablets in physics learning for five months. Based on pedagogical roles students and teachers played, 15 of the 20 functions were classified into three pedagogical categories: five for student-led, five for teacher-led, and five for collaborative functions (Journal of Science Education and Technology; Zhai, Li, & Chen, 28: 310–320, 2019). Results indicate that students perceived the collaborative functions as the most useful ones compared to student- and teacher-led functions. Also, the use frequency of mobile functions was highly aligned with students’ perceived usefulness by pedagogical category, and the pedagogical category was found to moderate the association between the perceived usefulness and the actual use frequency. That is, the relationship between the perceived usefulness and the use frequency varied significantly across the three pedagogical categories. We also found the use frequency mediated the relationship between perceived usefulness and physics learning achievement particularly for the collaborative functions. The male and female students tended to have different perceptional accountability of mobile technology for their physics learning achievement. Specifically, male students’ perception of collaborative functions positively predicted their physics learning achievement, while female students’ perception of student-led functions positively predicted their physics learning achievement. Both male and female students’ perception of teacher-led functions negatively predicted their physics learning achievement.