Creating a student profile using an empathy map to guide contextualized teaching strategies: The case of Liceo Estados Unidos in Dominican Republic

Abstract

In Latin America, and particularly in the Dominican Republic, many teaching strategies continue to rely on standardized approaches that do not always consider students’ sociocultural realities, interests, and everyday experiences. This disconnect is especially critical in reading comprehension, where national and international assessments consistently reveal low-performance levels. The objective of this study was to understand the sociocultural, motivational, and media profile of secondary school students using the empathy map as a methodological tool within the Human-Centered Design approach. The research adopted a qualitative design based on thirty semi-structured interviews with final-year secondary students from Liceo Estados Unidos de America in Santo Domingo. The analysis identified patterns related to family context, youth cultural practices, digital consumption, perceptions of reading, and students’ aspirations. Findings show a strong presence of digital environments and multimodal narratives in students’ daily lives, as well as an ambivalent relationship with reading shaped by thematic interest, and social dynamics. Overall, the results highlight the potential of the empathy map as a methodological tool for better understanding students’ experiences and guiding pedagogical practice toward the design of more contextualized, relevant, and inclusive educational strategies in the teaching of reading.