The impact of using digital geographic applications on acquiring social education concepts among university students

The aim of this study was to explore the impact of using digital geographic applications (DGA), Google Earth, Google Maps, GPS on Jordanian university students' understanding of social education concepts and their attitudes toward their use. The quasi-experimental approach was utilized to implement the experiment on a sample of 60 Jordanian university students, divided into two equal groups, each consisting of 30 students. The first group, the control group, was taught using the traditional lecture method, while the second group, the experimental group, was taught using modern digital applications in social education. In this study, an achievement test (pre-test/post-test) was administered to measure students' level of acquisition of social education concepts. The findings validated statistically significant differences at the significance level (α ≥ 0.05) between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups on the post-test in favor of the experimental group, emphasizing the positive impact of using digital geographic applications on students' acquisition of social education concepts. This is of high significance as it calls for incorporating digital geographic applications into teaching social education courses at Jordanian universities and training faculty members and students to effectively use them in the educational process. That said, this paper provides a set of practical recommendations and development proposals that will maximize the benefits of digital geographic applications in social studies education.