A pilot study comparing secondary school students’ perception of smart classrooms in Hong Kong and Beijing

This pilot study compared the difference in secondary school students’ perception of smart classrooms between Beijing and Hong Kong using the Smart Classroom Scale (SCS). The study found that students in Beijing had more advanced requirement in physical construction of smart classrooms, while students in Hong Kong had higher expectation on pedagogical activities and deep technology usage in smart classrooms to their counterparts in Beijing. There were significant differences in scales of physical design, learning experience, flexibility, learning data, differentiation, investigation, and cooperation in the SCS. These differences were related to the investment on information technology infrastructure, and pedagogical conception of learning and teaching in smart classrooms which guide the design of learning and teaching activities. The results indicated that the students’ perception to smart learning environment was affected by both educational technology investment and classroom pedagogical culture backgrounds. Both Beijing and Hong Kong students had the lowest score in learning data scale, this indicated that the smart use of learning data for pedagogical purpose was not yet thoroughly understood by secondary school students in smart classrooms. Copyright © 2014 Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education.