When a teacher hears about new technology, it can evoke a mix of curiosity and apprehension. On one hand, there’s the excitement of discovering a tool that could enhance their course. On the other hand, there’s a concern about the time and effort required to test and integrate this new tool. This balance between potential benefits and perceived challenges is common with new educational tools, and “Ace Yourself” is no exception. “Ace Yourself,” a mobile app designed to support students in developing crucial study, social, and personal skills, might evoke similar feelings. This app, grounded in scientific research, offers exercises and information to help students succeed in higher education. Yet, how can teachers implement this app without overwhelming their already packed schedules?
The potential and promise of the Ace Yourself App
The Ace Yourself App aims to provide students with scientific-based information and exercises for developing study, social, and personal skills needed for academic well-being and success. While some skills might seem basic, students come from diverse backgrounds with varying initial levels of these essential skills. Thus, universities can become more inclusive and supportive environments by offering tools to equalize these foundational skills. To minimize the resources teachers need to invest in implementing the Ace Yourself App, we studied how students use the app independently, without integration into the course. Our findings offer valuable insights into how teachers can incorporate the app with minimal effort while still achieving educational benefits. Next, we will explain the study’s results in simple terms, reflecting on what they reveal about the app’s implementation. For a more detailed study description, please refer to Ilishkina & Pass (2024).
Study description and students’ general feedback
Out of 152 first-year students, approximately a quarter were in the control group. In contrast, the remaining students used the Ace Yourself App for one month without any additional support or facilitation. Despite the small sample size, which may have limited the ability to detect significant improvements through quantitative analysis, the qualitative feedback was promising. Most of the 79 students who provided feedback had a favorable impression of the app. They praised its learning effectiveness and the quality and organization of its content, reported applying what they learned to their daily lives, observed changes in their thoughts and behavior, had a feeling of progress and improvement, and felt a sense of understanding. Still, students also mentioned a few drawbacks, which will be considered further.
Implementation Steps and Practical Advice for Teachers
Next, we will outline several strategies for implementing the app in your course with minimal effort, focusing on how to support students’ motivation to develop study, social, and personal skills while integrating the mobile app into their study routine. We will also provide examples of messages and frameworks that can be easily copy-pasted into the course introduction, helping students effectively use the Ace Yourself App to develop these skills.
1. Choose the skills that you want to develop in your course
First, look through the list of the skills suggested by the app and choose which ones are most essential for successful studying in your course (https://aceyourself.app/library):
Personal Domain:
- Confidence in one’s abilities — have confidence in your abilities. Believe in yourself
Social Domain:
- Peer learning — provide constructive feedback to and receive from class/students
- Create a diverse environment — being able to learn, work, and live effectively with people from different ethnic, social, and cultural backgrounds
Study Domain:
- Learning process monitoring — oversee, monitor, and evaluate one’s own thinking and learning process
- Plan and forecast — create and execute a study schedule
- Prepare research
- Conduct research
- Complete research
- Presentation — speak and present on different topics suitable for various target groups
- Learning strategies — ways to absorb and process information properly
The best way is to analyze what kind of activities your course consists of and choose the skills that are most involved. For example, if students give a lot of presentations in your course, you can choose the “presentation skill” from the app.
2. Support students’ motivation to develop the skills by appropriate introduction
Our study revealed some insights into why students consider some skills more valuable than others. These results can help you to communicate the suggestion to develop the particular skill more appropriately, Aware, that students participated in the study voluntarily, indicating they were already motivated to develop these skills. However, even among these students, some skills were considered more valuable than others.
Consider the skills that students consider as most valuable.
The most valuable skills from students’ perspectives were ‘confidence in your abilities’ (personal domain), ‘study strategies’, and ‘planning and predicting’ (study domain). If you have chosen these skills as essential for your course, that’s great! Likely, students will also find them valuable. Students appreciated these skills primarily because they viewed them as fundamental and beneficial for overcoming challenges and achieving academic success.
Even if you did not select these skills in the previous step, we still encourage you to inform students about the opportunity to develop them in the Ace Yourself App. This way, students in need can feel supported and easily access the necessary resources. You can use the following template text and adapt it for your LMS:
“While the primary focus of this course is not on developing soft skills, we recognize their fundamental importance to your overall success in this course. To support you in these critical areas, we have included links to the specific modules of the Ace Yourself App, which provide you with scientific-based information about important study skills. If you feel the need to strengthen these skills, please, read about them in the Ace Yourself App:
• Confidence in Your Abilities: Strengthen your self-belief and resilience with strategies to boost your confidence: https://aceyourself.app/library/he-confidence-in-your-abilities.
• Study Strategies: Discover effective techniques to enhance your learning process and improve your academic performance: https://aceyourself.app/library/he-study-strategies.
• Planning and Predicting: Learn how to plan effectively and predict potential challenges to stay on track with your studies: https://aceyourself.app/library/he-planning-and-predicting “
Consider the skills that students consider as least valuable.
Some students perceived research skills and skills for monitoring the study process as less valuable, either because they already possessed these skills or due to implementation difficulties. If these skills are essential to your course, we suggest two approaches to address students’ concerns about utility: either by clearly explaining the relevance of these skills or by encouraging students to explore and discover their importance on their own.
First, even a simple explanation can be effective (Wigfield & Eccles, 2020). We recommend clearly outlining why you consider these skills fundamental and how they will be beneficial for overcoming challenges and achieving academic success in your course. Here is an example of an explanation for research skills that can be communicated to students:
“Dear student, we encourage you to develop your research skills in this course, as they are valuable both here and beyond. Basic research skills are essential across various domains, even if you don’t intend to pursue an academic career. Practical research, marketing research, user experience research, desk research, and other inquiry strategies all rely on the ability to find and communicate valid information effectively. These types of research share common principles and foster higher-order thinking. You can start exploring the fundamentals of research thinking in the relevant modules of the Ace Yourself App, which aims to provide you with scientific-based information about these skills: https://aceyourself.app/library."
Example of an explanation for the monitoring study process that can be communicated to students:
“When and how do people truly learn? Is it while reading a textbook or solving a task? To some extent, yes. However, the most critical part of learning occurs after you’ve read a paragraph or solved a problem — when you pause to ask yourself what just happened and what you’ve learned from it. Did you genuinely understand something, or were you misled by the mere feeling of learning? Reflecting on what you’ve learned is a key aspect of monitoring your study process. Another crucial component is evaluating how you learned: Did you choose a strategy that suited both you and the task? How can you improve your approach to learning? How do you feel during the process? This is the second part of monitoring your study process — reflecting on your personal learning methods. Dear student, we encourage you to contribute to developing these fundamental skills in the Ace Yourself App, which aims to provide you with scientific-based information about these skills: https://aceyourself.app/library/he-monitor-your-study-process“.
The second promising way to help students connect with the subject and find meaning in skill development is to encourage them to reflect on and share how these skills could be valuable to them (Wigfield & Eccles, 2020). For example, the following message could be communicated to students:
“Dear student, we encourage you to contribute to the development of the ‘monitoring of study process’ / ‘research skills’ / [other skill] on this course, as these skills are needed during this course and beyond. We suggest you find the personal value of these skills through simple exercise. Go to the Ace Yourself App, which aims to provide you with scientific-based information about these skills. Review the description of the ‘monitoring of study process’ / ‘research skills’ / [other skill] and think about how these skills could be relevant to your studies and beyond. If the description is not detailed enough, scroll down to the suggested learning outcomes, which provide more specific insights into what you will be able to do and achieve with these skills.”
Consider the diversity of students’ needs.
Most students appreciated the app; however, some did not find it effective due to a lack of new information. The exercises in the app are primarily designed for novice students who may have heard of study, social, and personal skills but lack a deeper understanding of what these skills entail and how to apply them. Consequently, more experienced students in these areas might benefit less from the app. Therefore, we recommend allowing students to self-assess and decide whether the app will be valuable for their needs.
In the app, at the beginning of each module, there is a list of learning outcomes. You can ask students first to review these lists. They can proceed with the module if they find something new or relevant. If they have already achieved these learning outcomes, you can suggest they explore other skills the app offers. We recommend including a brief version of this message in the course introduction:
“Before diving into the module, check its introduction, where the learning outcomes are described. If you have already mastered the listed outcomes, feel free to explore other modules!”
This approach allows students to assess their needs and decide whether the app benefits them, allowing them to feel more in control of their learning choices.
Overall, a practical introduction should guide students in understanding the relevance of the chosen skills — why they are fundamental and beneficial for overcoming challenges and achieving academic success — while providing them with autonomy in deciding whether they need to develop the basics of the skills through the Ace Yourself App. However, as we mentioned, another potential obstacle identified by students was the anticipated difficulty in implementing what they learned. Next, we will discuss students’ concerns and provide tips on how to support them in transferring what they learn in the Ace Yourself App to real-life situations.
3. Consider how to support students when they are practicing the skills
Certainly, learning with the app without any support can make it difficult for students to apply new skills in practice. Some students recognize this limitation and doubt their ability to learn effectively from the app alone. Ideally, soft skills development should be an integral part of the educational system and curriculum, allowing teachers and students to dedicate time and prioritize these skills. However, we are still progressing towards such a curriculum.
One practical approach to supporting students without overhauling the curriculum is encouraging them to pair up or self-organize small study groups focused on helping each other develop soft skills. We recommend providing students with a guide on managing peer feedback and support sessions. Example of explanation:
“Developing soft skills solely through the app can be challenging, especially without receiving feedback. To support you in this process, we recommend finding a study buddy or forming small peer groups using the following framework for peer feedback and support sessions. The purpose of these sessions is to help each other reflect on three key questions: What am I learning? How is it going? What should I do next? These questions can serve as a solid foundation for your peer-to-peer support sessions. You can also enhance this approach by organizing group sessions (3–4 peers). For more structured feedback and support, consider using the Agenda-Led Outcome-Based Analysis (ALOBA) framework (Kurtz et al., 2005) to guide your discussions and reflections:
1. Select a facilitator who will guide the group through the following steps (different students can take on this role in each session).
2. Start with the learner’s agenda: Ask the peer to share any challenges they have encountered and what kind of support they would like from the group.
3. Ask the peer to describe the outcomes they are trying to achieve and how they plan to get there.
4. Encourage the peer to self-assess and find solutions independently.
5. Encourage the group to collaborate in generating solutions that help the learner and benefit others in similar situations. Allocate specific time for each step, ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to discuss their learning journey. Remember that larger groups will require more time, so aim for groups of 3–4 people. These frameworks can serve as a starting point for organizing peer feedback and support sessions, but feel free to explore other approaches and adapt them to suit your needs.
Sharing and receiving feedback is essential for learning and maintaining motivation. Even though feedback is not built into the app, you can still self-organize it!”
These small pieces of advice can help students develop their soft skills using the app without demanding extra time or effort from the teacher. However, even a brief mention of soft skills during the course, coupled with a short discussion in class about students’ progress in this area, could be incredibly valuable for them.
Ideally, the best results would come from integrating soft skills development into the core curriculum, making it part of course goals, assessment systems, and exercises. Nonetheless, simply providing links to Ace Yourself in the LMS could be a small but meaningful step toward achieving these larger goals.
Conclusion
Contributing to students’ soft skills development can be challenging, especially when these skills are not prioritized by the educational system and are not included in the course learning outcomes. Additionally, the widespread discussion of soft skills may create the expectation that students should already possess them when they enter university. However, students are diverse, and their levels of preparation vary. The Ace Yourself App offers a practical compromise for those who wish to support students in their lifelong learning journey by enhancing their soft skills without significantly altering the entire program. It can serve as a first step toward balancing education systems that focus heavily on hard skills with the equally important development of soft skills.
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References:
Ilishkina, D., & Pass, F. (2024). Assessing ‘ACE Yourself’: Enhancing higher education students’ study, social, and personal skills. In EDULEARN24 Proceedings: 16th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies (pp. xx-xx). Palma, Spain, 1–3 July, 2024. IATED. https://doi.org/10.21125/edulearn.2024
Kurtz, S., Draper, J., & Silverman, J. (2005). Teaching and Learning Communication Skills in Medicine (2nd ed.). CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781315378398
Eccles, J. S., & Wigfield, A. (2020). From expectancy-value theory to situated expectancy-value theory: A developmental, social cognitive, and sociocultural perspective on motivation. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 61, 101859.
