Mobile applications and pedagogical systems for fostering digital competence in higher education

Abstract

Research objective: to provide a theoretical rationale for, and experimentally verify, the developed pedagogical conditions and the system for fostering students' digital competence during their professional training. Analysis of data obtained during the baseline (formative) experiment revealed that students in both the control and experimental groups predominantly demonstrated initial or intermediate levels of digital competence. This showed the limited effectiveness of the existing process for fostering digital competence in higher education and highlighted the need to implement the proposed pedagogical conditions and the author's system for developing digital competence through mobile applications in the educational process. Aggregated data from the formative experiment regarding the digital competence of students in the experimental group indicate significant positive dynamic changes in the overall level of competence. The most substantial changes in the experimental group occurred at the initial level, whereas changes in the control group were negligible; this confirms the effectiveness of the system and pedagogical conditions we proposed. We performed statistical processing of the experimental results using Pearson’s chi-squared (χ²) test to substantiate the claim that the obtained results were not due to chance.