Mobile phones and devices are an integral part of the daily lives of students, and educators are increasingly trying to take advantage of this day-to-day usage for educational purposes. But how can mobile technologies, like app-based learning activities, be designed to effectively help students in the learning process?

A newly published study from Daniel Biedermann, Jasmin Breitwieser, Lea Nobbe, Hendrik Drachsler and Garvin Brod tries to answer this question.
Using the PROMT app, the team compared three types of learning activities used by children aged 9 to 14 years to memorize one learning plan per day over the course of 27 days. The activities varied in their planned level of cognitive engagement based on the ICAP framework, encompassing a passive reading task, an active retrieval (puzzle) task and a generative (emoji) task. After completing one of these 3 tasks, the students were prompted six hours later to write down the task as they remembered it. After doing the same type of task for 3 consecutive days, the students received another type of task to perform, so that in the end each student performed each type of task the same number of times.
Unlike their expectations, the researchers found that neither the puzzle nor the emoji activity was related to a better overall memorization than the passive reading activity. When looking at the induvial students, they found that the various types of learning tasks were more beneficial to some children than to others and that these variances were linked to the students’ motivation, their grade level and the time they spent on each task.

The findings from the study show that the more motivated the students were to perform a specific task, the more time they spent on the activity. This had a positive effect on the desired educational outcome, since the more the students cognitively engaged with the task, the higher their performance was. Personalized learning technologies should therefore be designed to increase student engagement in the set tasks by tailoring them to the attributes of learners, especially their motivational preferences and developmental needs.
Read the full article for more information:
Biedermann, D., Breitwieser, J., Nobbe, L., Drachsler, H. & Brod, G. (2025). Memorizing plans with an app: Large individual differences in the effectiveness of retrieval-based and generative learning activities in a naturalistic context. Learning and Individual Differences, 118, 102641. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2025.102641