Innovative technologies for developing university students’ soft skills
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46502/issn.1856-7576/2026.20.03.19Keywords:
soft skills, innovative educational technologies, higher education, university students, pedagogical experiment.Abstract
The study addresses the problem of developing university students’ soft skills through an integrated system of innovative educational technologies. The aim was to develop and experimentally evaluate a methodological system and pedagogical conditions for enhancing students’ soft skills in higher education. A four-stage pedagogical experiment was conducted from 2021 to 2025 and involved 387 university students, including 194 students in the experimental group and 193 in the control group. Students’ soft skills were assessed according to motivational, cognitive, activity, and reflective criteria and classified into four levels: low, reproductive, search, and creative. During the formative stage, the experimental group participated in an integrated intervention combining educational hackathons, project-based activities, simulations, business and role-playing games, professional discussions, digital collaboration tools, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and gamification. The results demonstrated substantially greater positive changes in the experimental group than in the control group. Mean scores in the experimental group increased by 0.62 points for the motivational criterion, 0.56 for the cognitive criterion, 0.76 for the activity criterion, and 0.68 for the reflective criterion. The overall pre–post difference in the experimental group was statistically significant (t = 12.192, p < .05). At the final stage, 57.73% of students in the experimental group demonstrated search or creative levels of soft skills development, compared with 42.49% in the control group. The findings indicate that participation in the integrated system was associated with greater improvement in university students’ soft skills than participation in regular educational activities.
References
Almeida, F., & Buzady, Z. (2022). Development of soft skills competencies through the use of FLIGBY. Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 31(4), 417–430. https://doi.org/10.1080/1475939X.2022.2058600
Almeida, F., & Morais, J. (2023). Strategies for Developing Soft Skills Among Higher Engineering Courses. Journal of Education, 203(1), 103-112. https://doi.org/10.1177/00220574211016417
Araújo, A. A., Kalinowski, M., & Baldassarre, M. T. (2025). Embracing experiential learning: Hackathons as an educational strategy for shaping soft skills in software engineering. In 2025 IEEE/ACM 37th International Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T) (pp. 319–324). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/CSEET66350.2025.00040
Betti, A., Biderbost, P., & García Domonte, A. (2022). Can active learning techniques simultaneously develop students’ hard and soft skills? Evidence from an international relations class. PLOS ONE, 17(4), e0265408. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265408
Chagovets, A., Chychuk, A., Bida, O., Kuchai, O., Salnyk, I., & Poliakova, I. (2020). Formation of motivation for professional communication among future specialists of pedagogical education. Revista Romaneasca pentru Educatie Multidimensionala, 12(1), 20–38. https://doi.org/10.18662/rrem/197
Heller, B., Amir, A., Waxman, R., & Maaravi, Y. (2023). Hack your organizational innovation: Literature review and integrative model for running hackathons. Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 12(1), 6. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13731-023-00269-0
Jardim, J., Pereira, A., Vagos, P., Direito, I., & Galinha, S. (2022). The Soft Skills Inventory: Developmental procedures and psychometric analysis. Psychological Reports, 125(1), 620–648. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033294120979933
Kitsios, F., & Kamariotou, M. (2023). Digital innovation and entrepreneurship through open data-based platforms: Critical success factors for hackathons. Heliyon, 9(4), e14868. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e14868
Munir, F. (2022). More than technical experts: Engineering professionals’ perspectives on the role of soft skills in their practice. Industry and Higher Education, 36(3), 294–305. https://doi.org/10.1177/09504222211034725
Ragusa, A., Caggiano, V., Trigueros Ramos, R., González-Bernal, J. J., Gentil-Gutiérrez, A., Bastos, S. A. M. C., González-Santos, J., & Santamaría-Peláez, M. (2022). High education and university teaching and learning processes: Soft skills. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(17), 10699. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph191710699
Sajja, R., Ramirez, C. E., Li, Z., Demiray, B. Z., Sermet, Y., & Demir, I. (2024). Integrating generative AI in hackathons: Opportunities, challenges, and educational implications. Big Data and Cognitive Computing, 8(12), 188. https://doi.org/10.3390/bdcc8120188
Shah, N., Bano, S., Saraih, U. N., Abdelwahed, N. A. A., & Soomro, B. A. (2023). Leading towards the students’ career development and career intentions through using multidimensional soft skills in the digital age. Education + Training, 65(6/7), 848–870. https://doi.org/10.1108/ET-12-2022-0470
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Inna Petrenko, Taras Soroka, Olena Trynus, Iryna Sundukova, Kateryna Pasynchuk
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
