Development of a Moral Feeling Based Mobile Application for Collaboration of Elementary School Teacher Education Students in Case-Based Learning

Abstract

Background. Student empathy tends to decline with increasing use of technology-based learning (Konrath et al., 2011), while collaboration remains a 21st-century competency that must be intentionally developed (Trilling & Fadel, 2009). PBL-based mobile collaboration applications in PGSD have been shown to enhance cooperation and higher-order thinking, but have not yet addressed the affective-moral dimension (Amaliyah et al., 2025).

Purpose. Producing a valid and effective mobile application design based on Moral Feeling (Lickona, 1991) to facilitate PGSD students’ empathy in case-based learning.

Method. Research and Development of the ADDIE model. Feasibility validation involved 2 material experts and 2 media experts. Effectiveness testing involved 39 PGSD students (Class A experiment, n=19; Class B control, n=20) through a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group design, empathy was measured by the adaptation of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1983).

Novelty. Previous PBL-based mobile collaboration research in PGSD focused on the cognitive dimension without affective-moral content. This research’s novelty is the integration of the Moral Feeling framework with a validated empathy instrument into the design of a case-based collaboration application for prospective elementary school teachers.

Results. Expert validation showed a very feasible category, and the group empathy score increased more in the experiment than in the control, effectively supporting the integration of Moral Feeling in case-based collaboration design for PGSD students.

Conclusion. This mobile application based on Moral Feeling has been proven valid and more effective in increasing the empathy of PGSD students compared to conventional learning without the application.