The impact of social mobile application on students’ learning interest and academic performance in Hong Kong’s sub-degree education

Abstract

Using social mobile application for communication is common in this generation and development is driving innovation. Social mobile applications take many social forms depending on a particular application. In addition to Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat is one of the most popular social mobile applications nowadays especially in China and Hong Kong. WeChat is a mobile text and voice messaging communication service developed by Tencent in China, which was released in 2011. It can exchange contacts with people nearby via Bluetooth, as well as providing various features for contacting people at random if desired, next to integration with social networking services such as those run by Facebook. Photographs may also be embellished with filters and captions, and a machine translation service is available. It is now very common in both China and Hong Kong. This study is to investigate the differences in academic performance and learning interest between students who used WeChat and who did not and we focused on accounting students as samples in this study. Academic performance was examined by their scores in continuous assessments, while accounting students' learning interest was indicated by questionnaires. The aim of this research is to evaluate the impact of social mobile application on students' learning interest so as to their performance.