Affordances of Mobile Devices and Their Effect on Content Retention: A Conceptual Review

Abstract

Content Retention in education is very important especially when the content learned is to be applied in life after school. Students in school are also expected after a period of lessons to sit for examinations for assessment of retained knowledge. This makes retention of subject content the key to a successful performance and life after school. This paper highlights ways the affordances of mobile devices can enhance content retention in mobile learning for better academic performance. A theoretical literature review was done to discuss common affordances of mobile learning. The affordances were categorized based on two notable features of mobile devices which are portability or ubiquity and connectivity and applications. The paper discussed how portability and ubiquity make it easy for learning to be enhanced in various ways. This feature allows the learner to be continuously exposed to the learning content and engage in spaced practice in learning that enhances content retention. Connectivity and application also facilitate creative learning collaboration, and experiential learning. This also makes it easy for the learner to customize their learning style and contextualize the information thereby improving cognitive retention. Communication and collaboration in education make learning socio-constructive. The paper concludes that as far as learning is concerned learners have the ultimate control in exploiting all affordances of mobile devices available for productive learning.