Abstract:

The Ace Yourself mobile-learning application aims enhance students’ personal, social, and study skills, and, thus, help them with transition to higher education. The Ace Yourself consists of several learning lines — the combination of modules aimed to develop a group of related skills within personal, social, or study domain.

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of the Ace Yourself by using a mixed-method experimental-control research design, which includes questionnaires and concept map assessment to answer the following reseach questions:
1: Does learning with Ace Yourself increase students’ basic psychological needs?
Second, we want to measure the learning outcomes;
2: What do students learn about social, personal, and study problems and skills from the Ace Yourself?

Higher education students who learn with Ace Yourself will be compared with those who will not in changes in their basic psychological needs and learning outcomes. Additionally, we plan to investigate what helps students to learn with Ace Yourself and what hinders them from learning by asking them to reflect on their experience through the survey with open questions.

For measuring the basic psychological needs (RQ1) and learning outcomes (RQ2) the following questionnaires will be used:
1. Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction Scale (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Gagné, 2003)
2. The Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionaire (MSLQ) (Pintrich et al., 1991)
3. Intercultural effectiveness scale (Portalla & Chen, 2010)
4. Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionaire (MSLQ)
5. Motivational Regulation Questionnaire (Schwinger et al., 2009)
6. To measure study skill — research — the open question will be given: Imagine that you need to do research. Describe the steps: What will you do?

Additionally, for learning outcomes measurement (RQ2), students will be asked to fill out the table in which they will be asked to:
(1) describe problems and tasks they are facing or may face at university;
(2) categorise them;
(3) describe how it is better to handle these problems or tasks.

Finally, only students from the experimental group will receive open questions to reflect on their experience with learning with Ace Yourself (RQ3, post-measurement only).

This study is based on the Activity theory (Engeström, 2021; Leont’ev, 1978). This theory provides us with the opportunity to take a broader perspective on Ace Yourself, viewing it as an m-learning system rather than confining it to just the app.

The data collection started in February 2024, so we cannot describe the results yet.

Keywords:

m-learning, activity theory, engagement, learning strategies, higher education.