Digital socio-cultural navigation as a means of pedagogical support for international students

Abstract

The article is devoted to digital sociocultural navigation as a pedagogical technology for supporting international students amid globalization and digital transformation of the university environment, where adaptation involves not only mastering academic regulations but also overcoming cultural shock, interpreting local norms, and integrating into informal practices of the student community. Digital navigation is interpreted as the construction of individual educational and cultural routes based on software tools and algorithms that perform a mediating function between the learner and the new sociocultural reality; the effect of double coding is emphasized, associated with the need to adapt to interfaces and, through them, to everyday social practices. It is shown that limiting digital services to administrative tasks reduces their adaptive potential, whereas a pedagogically designed smart assistant can dose and contextualize information, reduce cognitive load through visualization, interactivity, and gamification elements, translating adaptation into a proactive mode while maintaining a balance between online and offline communication. The effectiveness of the model was tested on a sample of 842 international students from three federal universities using standardized adaptation scales, the author’s diagnostics of digital competence, analysis of digital footprints in a mobile application, statistical procedures (correlation, factor analysis, t-test), and qualitative interpretation of reflective texts and curators’ interviews. Clusters of barriers (communicative-linguistic, academic-normative, socio-domestic, value-semantic) were identified, and their varying degrees of reduction were demonstrated: most noticeably in the academic-normative sphere (Δ=4.33; p 0.001), least in the value-semantic (Δ=1.07; p 0.01). Correlations show that interactive-event and communicative modules are associated with growth in social ties and engagement (r up to 0.823), while reference-service functions make a weak contribution. The final distributions of levels of sociocultural competence record significant growth in integration in the group with digital navigation (high level 39,3% vs. 15,2% in control) and substantial reduction in maladaptation (to 11,2%), justifying digital navigation as an enhancer of pedagogical support and a resource for freeing up curators’ time for value-communicative support and personalized trajectories.