Digital literacy as a key competency of students in the information society

The digital environment, saturated with platform services, algorithmic systems, and streams of heterogeneous information, is transforming educational practices and increasing demands on the quality of students’ work with data, sources, and digital channels of interaction. In these conditions, digital literacy ceases to be a set of technical skills and acquires the status of an integral educational competence that directly affects the effectiveness of learning and the sustainability of learning behavior.

The formation of digital literacy of students is necessary to ensure the conscious and safe use of digital tools, the development of critical thinking and learning autonomy, as well as the ability to make informed decisions in a situation of information uncertainty. With insufficient competence formation, the risk of uncritical borrowing of information, fragmented knowledge acquisition and cognitive overload increases, which reduces the quality of educational outcomes.

To analyze digital literacy as a systemic competence, an interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological approach has been applied using general scientific and special methods, including analysis and comparison of scientific interpretations, structuring of competence components and empirical and analytical assessment of its manifestations in educational activities. The empirical part of the study was carried out on the basis of educational programs of higher education (full-time and mixed forms); 186 students of 1–3d courses participated in the study. The results of the training tasks involving the search, selection, interpretation and presentation of digital information were used as data sources.

The results of the study allowed us to substantiate the evolution of approaches to digital literacy — from instrumental and technological understanding to a comprehensive cognitive and communicative model. The key components of digital literacy (information-analytical, critical-evaluative, communicative, regulatory and ethical) are highlighted, a level-by-level description of competence formation is proposed, and it is shown that the decisive factor is not formal ownership of services, but the quality of analytical strategies for working with digital data and sources.

Based on the results obtained, practical recommendations for the design of educational programs and assignments are formulated: the inclusion of tasks with mandatory verification of sources and data comparison, the use of real digital sources and visual analytics tools, the organization of reflection on digital actions, as well as the development of criteria for evaluating digital behavior and academic integrity.

The materials of the article are aimed at developers of educational courses and teachers and can be used in building an end-to-end model of digital literacy formation as an interdisciplinary learning outcome.

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