Students’ Perceptions on Mobile Phone Use for Knowledge Construction in Chinese Higher Education

This qualitative study explored how Chinese university students perceive and use mobile phones to help construct scholarly knowledge, an under-explored issue in existing studies that tend to examine the impact of mobile learning on scholarly achievement, motivation, or distraction. As a corrective to this gap in studies, the research tried to find out how students use mobile phones as a learning tool in everyday scholarly practice. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 Chinese university students from diverse disciplines. By thematic analysis, the study demonstrated that students used mobile phones in context-dependent and strategic ways, particularly when time was fragmented or there was no access to laptops. Learners used mobile phones to perform a range of learning activities like multimedia review, note-taking, collaboration, and conceptual exploration. While the mobile phone enhanced access and understanding, students also reported issues such as distraction, information overload, and surface learning. Constructivism and Cognitive Load Theory gave the study its theoretical framework, highlighting how students actively negotiate cognitive benefits and limitations. The results propose novel insights into reflective and psychological mobile learning, necessitating reflective integration of mobile technology into tertiary education for enabling meaningful and autonomous knowledge development.