Abstract
M.Ed. (Educational Psychology)
The advent of the digital age has brought about fundamental changes in teaching and learning, especially in supporting learning through the use of technology. Internation-ally, researchers have shown a keen interest in how well-being and learning are interrelated particularly because of learners being involved in their tasks not only intellectually, but also behaviourally and emotionally. Schools, by contrast, have traditionally emphasised the intellectual dimension in learning environments and have paid scant attention to the affective significance of well-being, whereas they should take the “whole” well-being of the person and the holistic interrelatedness of body and mind into account. Such a new approach has become all the more important in view of the inescapable trend towards learning with the assistance of mobile technologies over the past two decades. The primary aim of this study was to explore and describe Grade 10 learners’ notions of well-being when learning with mobile technologies in an independent school, and the investigation was therefore grounded in the relevant literature on well-being, successful learning, and learning environments in the 21st century.
An interpretivist viewpoint was selected as the most appropriate paradigmatic framework for achieving insight into the experiences of participants when learning with mobile technologies, as well as for exploring their notions of well-being. A generic qualitative research design was used and the research sample comprised 58 Grade-10 learners at an independent school who participated in a qualitative survey questionnaire, of whom eight were randomly selected to participate in a focus-group interview. Informed consent was obtained for both data-collection methods. The focus-group interview was audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. The researcher analysed all the data through thematic analysis by following Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six-step process to uncover the themes as described by the participants within the data of the qualitative survey questionnaire and the focus-group interview.
The learners’ experiences and notions were considered from the perspective of the physical, cognitive, social, and emotional dimensions of well-being related specifically to the adolescent phase of development. The data analysis indicated that the use of mobile technology for learning could exert both positive and negative effects on the experiences that influence learners’ hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. The open-...