Conference Agenda

The relationship between digital citizenship and civic outcomes remains understudied in the Latin American context. This gap is often attributed to the persistent digital divide across the region, where essential digital literacy skills are unevenly developed. For this reason, the main objective of this systematic literature review is to examine the relationship between digital literacy skills and citizenship in Latin America by answering the following questions:

1. What does existing evidence reveal about the relationship between digital literacy skills and digital citizenship in Latin America?

2. How has digital literacy skills and citizenship been conceptualized and measured?

3. What contextual factors influence this relationship?

4. How are these relationships addressed from an educational perspective?

The theoretical framework is based in the digital divides suggested by Van Dijk (2005) and Warschauer (2004) that reinforces existing systematic inequalities. Regarding the concept of Digital Citizenship, the framework of Choi (2017) and the International Civics ans Citizensip Studies (ICCS) were used to frame the concept in the Latin American context.

The study followed the PRISMA 2020 protocol for research methods, and databases such as Scopus, EBSCO, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, ERIC, SciELO, Redalyc, and Latindex were used to retrieve studies published between 2000 and 2025. This process led to the selection of 63 studies, from which three main themes were identified: digital divide and skills, digital literacy and citizenship, and digital citizenship and civic education.

The results indicate that the digital divide remains a persistent issue directly affecting the development of digital literacy skills across the region, a situation that became more evident after the COVID-19 pandemic. A lack of digital literacy skills consequently has a negative impact on digital citizenship and civic outcomes. The Latin American context faces a scenario of “digital orphanhood,” a condition in which individuals lack meaningful guidance from government, institutions and other agents for critical and purposeful digital inclusion and engagement. The findings suggest an urgent need for holistic and interdisciplinary action by governments, institutions, and other stakeholders to foster effective interventions across the region.

Vocabulary development plays a central role in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learning, particularly in the early school years when fundamental language skills are established. In primary EFL classrooms, vocabulary knowledge is closely related to learners’ ability to comprehend meaning, communicate effectively, and actively participate in classroom interaction (Tragant, 2015). For this reason, vocabulary instruction remains an essential component of language teaching in primary education.

In parallel with shifts toward more interactive and learner-centered approaches, collaborative learning has become an increasingly prominent pedagogical strategy in primary school contexts. Collaborative learning emphasizes shared responsibility, interaction, and mutual engagement among learners, creating learning environments in which students actively participate in meaning-making processes (Laal, 2013). In EFL settings, collaborative techniques are particularly beneficial for vocabulary learning, as they encourage meaningful language use through peer interaction and joint language production.

Alongside this pedagogical shift, digital technologies have begun to significantly influence the planning and implementation of educational activities in primary schools. As digital media has transformed how, when, and where learning takes place, instructional practices have increasingly moved beyond traditional formats (Liu & Moeller, 2019). Within this context, collaborative storytelling has emerged as a pedagogical approach that integrates digital support with collaborative learning. Digitally enhanced collaborative storytelling allows learners to create shared narratives using digital tools while employing target vocabulary in meaningful and communicative contexts.

Collaborative storytelling offers a supportive environment for vocabulary learning by embedding target words within shared narratives and encouraging learners to actively use vocabulary through interaction, negotiation of meaning, and joint language production. Despite these pedagogical developments, there is still limited classroom-based research examining the effects of digitally enhanced collaborative storytelling on young EFL learners’ vocabulary enhancement, particularly at the primary school level.

Addressing this gap, the present study investigates the impact of digitally enhanced collaborative storytelling on third-grade EFL students’ vocabulary enhancement. The study is guided by the following research questions:
(1) Is there a significant difference in vocabulary enhancement between third-grade EFL students who participate in digitally enhanced collaborative storytelling activities and those who receive non-collaborative instruction without digital storytelling activities?
(2) What classroom interactional patterns and vocabulary use behaviors are observed during digitally enhanced collaborative storytelling activities, as reflected in teacher journals and students’ sentence production?
(3) What is the overall impact of digitally enhanced collaborative storytelling on third-grade EFL students’ vocabulary enhancement, and how do classroom interaction and vocabulary use patterns observed in qualitative data relate to the quantitative outcomes?

The use of generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in European Higher Education is reshaping teaching, learning, and assessment practices. Alongside clear opportunities (e.g., writing support, personalised tutoring, and ideation), substantial educational risks are emerging: the outsourcing of reasoning, the weakening of academic authorship, over-reliance on plausible yet inaccurate outputs, and the erosion of students’ epistemic agency. In this context, the challenge is no longer whether GenAI should be used, but rather how to design learning situations that compel students to think critically with and about GenAI.

This paper presents the early-stage project PID2024-157674NB-I00 DIDACT.AI (funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and ERDF, EU), which aims to design and validate a transferable didactic model for teaching critical thinking in university settings where GenAI is part of the learning ecosystem. The project is structured around four research questions: (1) What beliefs and expectations do university teachers and students hold regarding the potential and limitations of GenAI for teaching and learning? (2) What kinds of GenAI-related learning tasks are currently being proposed and how are they being assessed? (3) Can a didactic model be designed and empirically validated to foster critical thinking when students use GenAI? (4) How can Open Educational Resources (OER) support faculty professional development for implementing this model?

The core innovation of DIDACT.AI is a didactic model of critical thinking with GenAI, operationalised through six pedagogical dimensions that position GenAI as an «object of scrutiny» and a «tool under pedagogical control», rather than a substitute for thinking: (1) Interrogation: posing questions that challenge assumptions, limits, and conditions of validity in GenAI outputs; (2) Comparison: contrasting GenAI responses with one another, with academic sources, and with expert knowledge; (3) Critical dialogue: sustaining argumentative interaction with GenAI and among peers, making reasons, evidence, and counterarguments explicit; (4) Verification: checking facts, references, data, bias, and informational traceability, and judging reliability; (5) Personal re-elaboration: transforming outputs into one’s own work through conceptual contribution, contextualisation, and justification; and (6) Reflection: metacognitive examination of decisions, biases, ethics of use, authorship, learning, and quality criteria.

These dimensions are integrated into task sequences and assessment criteria intended to make critical thinking visible and assessable. The European relevance of the project lies in addressing shared concerns across the European Higher Education Area (e.g., integrity, transparency, equity, and critical literacy) and in pursuing transferable outcomes through inter-institutional comparison and the development of OER to support adoption across diverse European universities.

The rapid expansion of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini is transforming learning practices across European secondary education systems. While policy frameworks increasingly emphasize the potential of GenAI to enhance personalization, efficiency, and learner autonomy, parallel concerns have emerged regarding cognitive dependency, surface learning, and the weakening of students’ self-regulatory capacities (Baidoo-Anu & Ansah, 2023; Kasneci et al., 2023). These tensions are particularly pronounced at the high school level, where learners are still developing academic habits, epistemic responsibility, and educational identities (Rubie-Davies, 2006). Despite this, empirical research on GenAI has largely focused on higher education, leaving adolescents’ experiences underexplored (Crompton & Burke, 2023).

This study contributes to this gap by examining how high school students across diverse European contexts perceive and integrate GenAI into their learning processes. The guiding research question is: How do secondary school students in different European educational contexts conceptualize and emotionally experience GenAI use, and how do these perceptions relate to their self-reported learning behaviors? Rather than assuming homogeneous effects, the study adopts a cross-contextual and cyberpsychological perspective, foregrounding students’ subjective interpretations of GenAI as a learning tool.

The theoretical framework integrates two complementary strands. First, an adapted version of Kirkpatrick’s evaluation model is employed to distinguish analytically between (a) emotional reactions to GenAI use, (b) perceived learning processes, and (c) self-reported behavioral adaptations (Kirkpatrick & Kirkpatrick, 2006). These dimensions are not treated as indicators of a single latent construct; instead, they are conceptualized as theoretically distinct yet interacting facets of learners’ engagement with GenAI. This approach responds to methodological critiques in educational technology research that caution against over-aggregation of heterogeneous constructs under global indices of “effectiveness” (Pavlik, 2023).

Second, the study is grounded in cyberpsychological theory, which conceptualizes digital learning environments as spaces where agency, dependency, and identity are continuously negotiated (Suler, 2016). From this perspective, students’ engagement with GenAI is understood not merely as tool use, but as a psychologically and socially situated process shaped by emotional ambivalence, perceived responsibility, and future-oriented concerns. This framing aligns with recent European discussions on human-centered and ethically grounded AI integration in education (European Commission, 2022; Holmes & Miao, 2023).

To make students’ overarching orientations toward GenAI analytically visible, the study introduces the heuristic metaphor of “Jet Engine” versus “Digital Crutch.” This metaphor is explicitly positioned as a descriptive cognitive anchor, capturing dominant mental representations rather than serving as a diagnostic or evaluative classification. Importantly, the framework does not assume a binary opposition; instead, it conceptualizes GenAI engagement as a continuum of profiles, allowing for simultaneous experiences of empowerment and dependency. Such continuum-based interpretations are increasingly advocated in recent GenAI and learning research to reflect learners’ ambivalent and non-linear relationships with emerging technologies (Kasneci et al., 2023).

The European and international contribution of this study lies in its focus on cross-contextual sense-making rather than premature cross-national comparison. By situating students’ perceptions within varied educational cultures and policy environments, the framework highlights how GenAI engagement is shaped by contextual factors such as assessment pressure, institutional norms, and future imaginaries. In doing so, the study complements large-scale policy and system-level analyses by providing a learner-centered, theoretically grounded perspective on GenAI integration in secondary education (Coryton, 2024).

Overall, the contribution of this study is conceptual rather than confirmatory. It advances a theoretically coherent framework for understanding adolescents’ evolving relationships with GenAI, emphasizing emotional ambivalence, agency, and contextual embeddedness. By doing so, it offers a cautious yet timely contribution to European debates on responsible, inclusive, and developmentally sensitive uses of Generative AI in education.