Fostering Digital Literacy through Active Learning in Engineering Education

This Research-to-Practice Full Paper discusses the use of the active learning approach to enhance the 21st century skills that are critical to developing new job opportunities for young engineers. The soft skills required in the Fourth Industrial Revolution make the traditional mode of logical-scientific thinking insufficient for the degree of innovation and disruption required in future jobs. In the field of higher engineering education, the situation was doubly challenging: Generation Z students' cognitive skills had to be improved in terms of digital literacy and cutting-edge technological tools had to be quickly incorporated. This work is a study on the effectiveness of the didactic approach of Active Learning in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics) and the innovative ways of empowering students to develop digital literacy skills, among them: photo-visual ability, reproduction ability, branching ability, real-time critical thinking ability and, the most important of this study, socio-emotional ability. The opportunities and challenges that the study addressed were related to accessibility, inclusion, and self-paced learning. The research was carried out with a mixed experimental methodology in a sample of 352 engineering students, who were evaluated with different types of instruments to know the level of acquisition of soft skills related to digital literacy. To evaluate these skills, different assessing instruments were used for pre-tests and post-tests, including: vocabulary level, lateral thinking ability, fluency and originality; as well as story-articulation skill tests and modified VALUE rubrics from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). The results obtained showed that the active learning approach promoted a better understanding of scientific concepts in engineering subjects, a greater ability to develop digital communication skills, and a greater awareness of creative thinking skill.