The Relationship Between Students’ Digital Activity and their Perceptions of the Effectiveness of AR-Based Assessment of Academic Performance on Social Media

Immersive technologies are being actively introduced into people’s lives, increasingly involving them in the digital environment. Social networks are no exception, integrating various augmented reality (AR) masks to entertain and encourage users’ digital activity. This study aims to determine the relationship between students’ digital activity and their perception of AR masks on social media for assessment. The quasi-experimental method combined the analysis, survey and pedagogical experiment. The sampling size included 491 undergraduate students from L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University and A. Margulan Pavlodar Pedagogical University. Fourteen purposefully-designed AR masks for the TikTok social network in the discipline of Information and Communication Technologies were used in the formal assessment of the academic achievements of 253 students in the experimental group. The remaining 238 students were in the control group being evaluated traditionally. In addition, a survey was conducted to identify the link between students’ digital activity and perceptions of the effectiveness of these AR masks. The results revealed that the level of digital activity of students is moderate (M = 3.25, SD = 0.66), while assessment using AR masks is perceived as more effective than traditional (t(252) = -16.7, p < 0.001). This suggests that even a moderate level of digital activity can substantially enhance the effectiveness of AR-based assessment. The results of the conducted pedagogical experiment show an increase in the average score from 66.4% to 71.2% and confirms the hypothesis about the effectiveness of using AR masks in social networks for the formative assessment of academic achievements. It can be concluded that AR masks on social networks serve as a valuable complement to traditional formative assessment methods, effectively capturing and reflecting students’ digital activity.