The Impact of Digital Technology on Female Students’ Learning Experience in Partition-Rooms: Conditioned by Social Context

Contribution: As expected, a partition-room environment negatively affects students' learning. An unexpected result of this study is that female students occasionally choose not to use the technology available in partition-rooms, to avoid undesirable facial exposure. Background: The main purpose of partition-rooms is to prevent male instructors from seeing female students' faces. In learning environments where instructors and students are physically separated, technology is expected to play an integral role in bridging the gap. In one side of partition-rooms, female students use their own mobile devices, such as laptops, tablets and mobile phones, for course activities and communication; in the other side, the instructor has various digital teaching equipment provided by the institution. Research Question: What effect does a partition-room's physical environment have on female students' academic performance, satisfaction, technology efficacy, and perceived learning? What effect does a partition-room's social environment have on female students' academic performance, satisfaction, technology efficacy, and perceived learning? Methodology: Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were followed. Quantitative results were obtained from a student questionnaire. Qualitative data was gathered in a focus group session. Findings: The communication benefits offered by technology are impaired by both the physical context and the cultural-social context. The latter emerged during focus group discussions where students said that their faces might by revealed in the light emitted by their devices. Thus, local culture and social context limit the benefits of using digital technology in the classroom.

I. Introduction

The learning experience is specific to each individual; the learner has both a personal identity and a collective identity. Personal identity is defined by the learning style of the person, as introduced by Barbe et al. [1], where visual, auditory, kinesthetic or tactile are the main learning modalities. Collective identity is defined by the learning community, the school/university where the learner is taught, and by the cultural community, the norms, rules, roles and expectations that give the social context within a given community.