Assessment of the digital competencies of students at a public university

Resumen

This research analyzes the competencies in hard digital skills of first-year students at a Mexican public university, based on the assumption that use of technological devices in context alone is not sufficient to provide students with the necessary resources for competent academic performance within virtual learning environments. Using a psychometric tool administered to a pilot group of thirty-two students, the authors report an acting gap: communication through social networks and instant messaging channels receives strong scores; tasks with structured reasoning debugging logical errors, initiating tasks on institutional assessment platforms, generating original metadata collapse low or critically-low. This finding challenges the oft-cited stereotype of the digital native, is a student who promiscuously and popularly (but certainly informally) uses technology, showing us that informal comfort with technology and formal technical expertise are differentiated from each other domains practices that do not transfer into one another. The study does not find any gender-related differences, so while it identifies the problem of insufficient higher-order understanding and proficiency as a serious one facing the upper-secondary graduates in México today it characterises that issue as a broad, structural one rather than an individual or isolated shortcoming. A case in point is the proposal requiring the establishment of mandatory remedial programs starting from point-of-entry, which brings to an important debate about how much responsibility over lack of competencies that should have been consolidated before reaching university.