The impact of persuasive SMS on students' self-regulated learning

This paper presents the outcome of an experimental design to investigate the impact of persuasive short messaging service (SMS) on students' self-regulated learning strategies while attending an introductory information systems course over a 12-week trimester. The participants were undergraduate students enrolled in INFO 101 at a tertiary institution in New Zealand. The instrument used in this study was the original motivated strategies for learning questionnaires (MSLQ) developed by Pintrich. MSLQ measures three general types of strategies: cognitive, meta-cognitive and resource management. The findings of the research identified that several aspects of students' learning strategies had been improved for the experiment group while the Time and Study Environment Management dimension of MSLQ had been significantly lowered for the control group who received no SMS intervention. The study demonstrates a positive impact of persuasive SMS on students' learning and suggests that the intervention is able to improve students' self-regulated learning effort compared to the control group. Moreover the study shows that students who received SMS intervention performed better than students who did not receive SMS intervention. Most importantly, the study shows that SMS intervention enables Maori and Pacific students, who historically have a lower performance than the main cohort, to perform better than the main cohort and to a significant level higher than those Maori and Pacific students who did not receive any SMS intervention. This study suggests that practitioners should consider the adoption of the persuasive SMS intervention by using the principles of persuasive technology for sending SMS messages especially for the high risk students.