Comparing Attitudes Towards Mobile App Development between International Students and Domestic Japanese Students

Mobile app development courses are popular among university students. However, learning design in app development education is primarily instructor-centered, and little effort has been made to understand students’ beliefs and opinions of the subject. Meanwhile, the on-going changes in the higher education landscape in Japan also demand investigations into potential differences between international students and domestic students. In this paper, we present our findings comparing the attitudes of international and domestic Japanese students towards mobile app development. We adapted a web development attitude survey to probe students’ confidence, motivation, belief in gender equality, perceived usefulness, perceived knowledge structure, learning style, self-reliance, and contextualization of app development. In total 162 responses (31% was international student) were collected during 2020-2023. We found that international students overall had more positive attitudes. Statistically significant differences were identified in the constructs of confidence, gender, and context. Surprisingly, we found that domestic students may benefit from a collaborative learning environment more than expected. Future course design should focus on helping students build their confidence in learning the subject, as well as fostering knowledge transfer from classroom to real-world problem-solving.