Academic Performance and Mobile Technology Use during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Comparative Study

ABSTRACT

Most North American colleges and universities switched to online courses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, it is important to explore the impact of the newly remote courses on the academic lives of postsecondary students with and without disabilities and on technology use by students. It is also important to ascertain which newly used technologies are likely to be useful in the future. To do this, we surveyed 121 students with disabilities and 51 without disabilities and asked them about their academic performance and about the smartphone and tablet technologies they used to do schoolwork during the pandemic. Results indicate that most students were having a difficult time with learning and studying and that students with disabilities were experiencing more challenges, including the need to drop courses. The most common problems dealt with concentration, motivation, and discipline. The only positive impact reported relates to flexibility and time management. Approximately 70% of students used some form of mobile technology to do schoolwork, primarily Apple devices. The most common technologies reported by students were Zoom, Google Docs, and Microsoft Word. Overall, most of these worked well, although over one third of both groups indicated that Zoom worked poorly. Where there were differences between the two groups, results show that the technologies were more problematic for students with disabilities. The variety of smartphone and tablet apps used by postsecondary students during the pandemic suggests that now that they have learned to use these, students will continue to use many of these once the pandemic is over.