# A Framework for Mobile-Assisted Formative Assessment to Promote Students' Self-Determination
## 2 Materials and Methods
### Procedures  
The study was implemented in the context of a secondary science course, during a period of two weeks. Figure 4 displays the experimental procedure. Participating students were randomly assigned to two groups: twenty-five students for the control group and twenty-six students for the experimental group. Before the experiment, students completed a pre-questionnaire about their pre-existing levels of motivation. All students attended the same tutorial sessions (same subject content knowledge) about electrical circuits and biodiversity in the context of their Physics (week 1) and Biology classes (week 2).  
Figure 3: Motivation supportive mobile technologies.  
Our research design incorporates multiple contexts in order to gain a more meaningful and comprehensive insight into students' motivation (across two subject of the science curriculum and across inside and outside the classroom boundaries, i.e., physics lab--relatively fixed location and botanic gardens--outdoors). The significance of the multiplicity of contexts for understanding motivation and learning has been acknowledged by previous studies [67]. Following each tutorial session, students participated in formative assessment (assessment for learning) activities that had been developed by the two class teachers in cooperation with the researchers. Table 1 shows the learning and assessment activities for both groups.  
The design of the learning and assessment activities for both the control and the experimental group was based on layer 1 and layer 2 of the proposed framework (Figure 5). However, the experimental group experienced specific affordances of mobile technologies (layer 3): context-aware learning through mobile-readable QR-codes (acr3.1), mobile-based digital artifacts (e.g., photos) (c2.1), automated knowledge-of-correct-response feedback  
Figure 4: The experimental procedure.  
provided by the mobile devices (ac2.3), cloud-based shared learning space for collaboration (ac7.3), social network connectivity for on-line discussions (r3.3).  
The mobile-based version of the assessment was developed using the jQuery mobile framework for the user interface and PHP and MySQL for the server backend support. Students were presented with instructions to perform their required assessment tasks (e.g., a collaborative task) and short questions that had to be answered (true/false or multiple choice with knowledge-of-correct-response feedback).  
Figure 6 presents two screenshots of the mobile version of the assessment. The screenshot on the left illustrates an activity of creating a knowledge artefact and uploading it on a wiki. The screenshot on the right illustrates the task of locating a learning object in the physical world and then uploading its digital representation to a shared folder. Both activities were accompanied by answering closed-type questions with feedback.  
In Figure 7, the left side shows students during the assessment in the electricity lab and the right side shows students during the mobile-assisted assessment in the botanic gardens.  
After the intervention, all students completed a post-questionnaire about their perceived levels of autonomy, competency, and relatedness. Following the post-test, short informal face-to-face interviews with seven randomly selected students (four from the experimental group and three from the control group), were also conducted, in order to elicit extra information for the participant's perceived levels of autonomy, competence, and relatedness.  
Figure 5: Implemented components of the framework.  
Figure 6: Screenshots of the mobile-based formative assessment.