Development of Digital Learning Media on the Icons of the Nusantara Capital City to Enhance Critical Literacy of Fifth-Grade Elementary Students

This study aims to develop digital learning media featuring the Icons of the Nusantara Capital City (IKN) to enhance the critical literacy skills of fifth-grade elementary school students through an ADDIE-based Research and Development (R&D) model. Validation by content experts and media experts indicated that the developed product met the “Highly Valid” category, with an average score of 90%, encompassing content relevance, informational accuracy, visual design quality, and interactive navigation. The practicality of the media was also rated as “Highly Practical,” achieving an average score of 89% based on teacher and student responses, which highlighted the media’s ease of use, attractiveness, efficiency, and ability to support active learning engagement. The effectiveness of the media was demonstrated by a significant improvement in students’ critical literacy scores, increasing from a pretest mean of 60.32 to a posttest mean of 83.75, with an N-gain value of 0.70 (high category). The Paired Sample t-test yielded a significance value of 0.000, while the effect size (Cohen’s d = 1.87) was classified as very high. These findings confirm that the IKN digital learning media effectively enhances students’ visual interpretation, analytical, and evaluative skills, and serves as a relevant instructional tool for fostering critical literacy in elementary education.