Understanding College Students’ Engagement in Mobile Reading for Sustainability in Education: A Case Study from China

Mobile reading is viewed as a promising pathway to reading with sustainable education goals. At present, there have been many studies on the mobile reading of young readers and their reading comprehension by testing their task-based comprehension, but not much attention has been paid to the mobile reading of college students in China and the factors of reading engagement from readers’ perspectives. With the aim to investigate the factors that affect college students’ engagement in mobile reading, this study used interviews with open-ended questions and followed a qualitative content analysis design with an inductive and exploratory approach. The participants of this study were thirty college students with diverse majors out of three universities in Shanghai, China. They were selected from a pre-questionnaire, and these students (N = 30) were chosen from those who read on mobile devices for less than 2 h on average per day (N = 276). The results revealed that the college students perceived a variety of factors affecting their engagement in mobile reading, including the following: four motivational needs (information needs, academic needs, social needs, emotional needs), reading experience, reading efficacy, and reading strategies. It has been assumed that the most common factor that leads to the engagement of college students in mobile reading is the intention to be entertained. The investigation of this study has different results. Even the students who spent the minimum average time mobile reading used it with diverse needs in mind. Nevertheless, students’ reading experience, reading self-efficacy, and reading strategies indicated that sometimes they had difficulties engaging in mobile reading. These difficulties resulted from an imbalance between their needs and their engagement: whether they obtained what they needed. Considering that mobile reading could be an effective way to assist college students’ independent learning and sustainable development in future, it is necessary to understand the factors of mobile reading and rethink how to avoid difficulties to improve the mobile reading engagement of college students.