Assessment of Digital Skills in the Context of Social Media

Digital skills are essential in a broad range of today's life and properly dealing with social media is one important and challenging area. Thus, this research study focuses on investigating and devising a method to assess digital skills in the context of social media applications. The study is executed online via the custom-made CoDiS Survey tool to measure and track social media habits of participants. An online task related to social media usage and an evaluation questionnaire based on digital skills was developed. In this context, the most relevant communication, creation, privacy and security as well as information skills were assessed in this study. To this end, focus target groups -- 35 high school and university students performed social media activities including estimating the sentiment of the content provided and finally completed a questionnaire. In assessing the skills, the users performed tasks such as sharing a post with friends, sharing posts with the public, commenting, estimating the sentiment and had the opportunity to check whether the articles are fake or real. The devised measuring instrument has provided with the results of social media proficiency skill levels. The findings emphasize the importance of such skills in order to properly use such platforms for education, classifying information and privacy. The fact that only 57,93% of the respondents were able to adequately fact-check the articles, tells us that we need to further study this matter so we can present potential solutions to the use of social media by students.