Fostering Digital Life Skills Through Social Media With Adolescents in 6 German States: Protocol for an Accessibility Study According to the RE-AIM Framework

BACKGROUND

Social media is essential in the lives of adolescents, with 97% of US teenagers engaging daily. While it facilitates communication, learning, and identity development, it also poses risks like harmful content exposure and psychological distress, particularly for adolescents in their critical developmental stage. Teaching digital life skills innovatively counters these risks, adapting traditional competencies such as decision-making, problem-solving, creative and critical thinking, communication, interpersonal skills, self-awareness, empathy, and emotional and stress management to digital challenges.

OBJECTIVE

This study evaluates the accessibility of the "leduin" program, a novel intervention designed to impart digital life skills through Instagram. The program aims to leverage social media's educational potential, focusing on effective strategies to engage adolescents. Emphasizing accessibility is crucial, as it determines the program's overall impact.

METHODS

The leduin program, developed through intervention mapping, applies behavior change techniques via social media for 9th and 10th graders. It is a 14-week spaced learning curriculum with daily sessions <5 minutes. Emphasizing the "reach" aspect of the reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation, and maintenance (RE-AIM) model, the recruitment targets diverse educational settings across 6 German states, aiming for inclusivity. Recruitment will involve schools, youth centers, and therapeutic facilities. The study seeks at least 128 participants, a calculated minimum to detect medium-sized effects in the quasi-experimental design and explore varying engagement levels and program responses. Data collection includes preintervention, postintervention, and 6-month follow-up surveys, using multilevel regression, latent growth models, and qualitative analysis to extensively assess reach and gain first insights on effectiveness, acceptance, implementation, and maintenance. The study aims to reveal key factors influencing program participation and interaction; a detailed analysis of engagement patterns will reveal the effectiveness of the recruitment strategies and barriers to participation. Additionally, initial indications of the program's impact on life skills, social media-related skills, health status, risk behaviors, and academic performance will be analyzed.

RESULTS

Recruitment was planned from May 2023 until the beginning of the leduin program in October 2023. As of March 2024, we have recruited 283 participants.

CONCLUSIONS

The leduin program stands as an innovative and essential initiative in adolescent health promotion, harnessing the power of social media to teach important digital life skills. This study highlights the critical role of accessibility in the success of social media interventions. Effective adolescent engagement strategies are imperative, as they dictate the overall impact of such interventions. The insights gained from this study will be instrumental in shaping future programs, laying groundwork for a subsequent, more comprehensive cluster-randomized controlled trial. The study's design acknowledges the limitations of the current quasi-experimental approach, including the anticipated sample size and the absence of a control group, and aims to provide a foundational understanding for future research in this field.

TRIAL REGISTRATION

Deutsches Register Klinischer Studien DRKS00032308; https://drks.de/search/de/trial/DRKS00032308.

INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID)

PRR1-10.2196/51085.

Meaningful Learning Experiences in Everyday Life During Pandemics. A Qualitative Study

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed the lives of people all over the world. In particular, an unprecedented educational crisis has occurred due to the circumstances of physical distancing and remote learning. This article focuses specifically on the meaningful learning experiences in the everyday lives of adolescents during the pandemic. 72 meaningful learning experiences were identified from 11 participants who recorded their specific learning experiences for a week by a means of a journal recorded by themselves. A content analysis was undertaken in order to identify the ecology (what, how, where, and who with) of the different learning experiences. The results show a prevalence of personal and conceptual learning, a presence of both formal and specifically informal, everyday activities among the meaningful learning experiences detected, the importance of peers, teacher and “learning experiences while alone,” and the use of digital technologies as learning resources; they also reveal the assistance of others in the learning process. The main contribution of this study illustrates how students in everyday life during pandemics are involved in a whole range of different activities both at school and at home.

Origin of life in a digital microcosm

While all organisms on Earth share a common descent, there is no consensus on whether the origin of the ancestral self-replicator was a one-off event or whether it only represented the final survivor of multiple origins. Here, we use the digital evolution system Avida to study the origin of self-replicating computer programs. By using a computational system, we avoid many of the uncertainties inherent in any biochemical system of self-replicators (while running the risk of ignoring a fundamental aspect of biochemistry). We generated the exhaustive set of minimal-genome self-replicators and analysed the network structure of this fitness landscape. We further examined the evolvability of these self-replicators and found that the evolvability of a self-replicator is dependent on its genomic architecture. We also studied the differential ability of replicators to take over the population when competed against each other, akin to a primordial-soup model of biogenesis, and found that the probability of a self-replicator outcompeting the others is not uniform. Instead, progenitor (most-recent common ancestor) genotypes are clustered in a small region of the replicator space. Our results demonstrate how computational systems can be used as test systems for hypotheses concerning the origin of life.This article is part of the themed issue 'Reconceptualizing the origins of life'.

Evolvability Tradeoffs in Emergent Digital Replicators

The role of historical contingency in the origin of life is one of the great unknowns in modern science. Only one example of life exists-one that proceeded from a single self-replicating organism (or a set of replicating hypercycles) to the vast complexity we see today in Earth's biosphere. We know that emergent life has the potential to evolve great increases in complexity, but it is unknown if evolvability is automatic given any self-replicating organism. At the same time, it is difficult to test such questions in biochemical systems. Laboratory studies with RNA replicators have had some success with exploring the capacities of simple self-replicators, but these experiments are still limited in both capabilities and scope. Here, we use the digital evolution system Avida to explore the interplay between emergent replicators (rare randomly assembled self-replicators) and evolvability. We find that we can classify fixed-length emergent replicators in Avida into two classes based on functional analysis. One class is more evolvable in the sense of optimizing the replicators' replication abilities. However, the other class is more evolvable in the sense of acquiring evolutionary innovations. We tie this tradeoff in evolvability to the structure of the respective classes' replication machinery, and speculate on the relevance of these results to biochemical replicators.