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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1571926
This article is part of the Research Topic AI Innovations in Education: Adaptive Learning and Beyond View all 3 articles
Does more support mean more literacy? The relationship and mechanisms between digital support and college students' digital literacy
Provisionally accepted
Ru Yan *
Wenjing Hu *- Xiamen University, Xiamen, Fujian Province, China
The growing interest for digitization in education underscores the importance of students’ digital literacy. However, few previous studies have focused on the important role of digital support in college students’ digital literacy. Therefore, guided by the person-context interaction theory and based on a survey of 2,157 college students, this study aimed to reveal the effects of digital device support and digital technology support on college students’ digital literacy, and to further examine the mediating roles of self-efficacy and interpersonal interactions. The results showed that both digital device support and digital technology support positively predicted digital literacy, and self-efficacy and interpersonal interaction mediated the relationship between digital device support and digital literacy. Self-efficacy mediated the relationship between digital technology support and digital literacy, while interpersonal interaction had a non-significant mediating effect in this relationship. Additionally, self-efficacy significantly predicted interpersonal interaction, forming a chain mediation effect between digital device support, digital technology support, and digital literacy. This study explores the relationship between digital support and digital literacy in college contexts, emphasizing the important role of individual factors in this connection. The findings contribute to a systematic understanding of how environmental factors influence individual competence, provide empirical support for digital literacy research, and offer actionable insights for improving digital literacy in higher education. It is noteworthy that the research methods used in this study were based on self-reports, which may not accurately reveal causal relationships. Future research could improve the applicability and generalizability of the findings by adopting multimodal approaches.
Keywords: Digital technology support, digital device support, Digital Literacy, self-efficacy, Interpersonal interaction
Received: 06 Feb 2025; Accepted: 02 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yan and Hu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Ru Yan, Xiamen University, Xiamen, 361005, Fujian Province, China
Wenjing Hu, Xiamen University, Xiamen, 361005, Fujian Province, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.