Hafis Muaddab, Hari Wahyono, Nasikh, Agus Hermawan, Khudrotun Nafisah
Tax literacy remains a persistent challenge for vocational students, particularly because internship experience rarely transfers to classroom tasks requiring coherent conceptual understanding, multi-step reasoning, and procedural justification. This study develops and evaluates a mobile learning application integrating critical thinking and adaptability for vocational tax education using a Design-Based Research (DBR) approach. A needs analysis involving 190 vocational students revealed substantial internship engagement alongside predominantly low-to-middle socioeconomic backgrounds and moderate access to digital technology. Interviews with four vocational tax teachers identified fragmented understanding of tax regulations, difficulties in procedural reasoning, and reduced cognitive engagement resulting from teacher-centered instruction and unregulated smartphone use, while media experts noted that existing instructional materials were largely static and inadequate for reasoning-based learning. In response, a Flutter-based mobile learning prototype was developed, comprising four simulation-based modules structured around the Oiko Nomo Adventure narrative. The application incorporated branching procedural pathways, justification checkpoints, and cognitive scaffolding to support reasoning within workplace-simulated tax tasks such as document validation, tax recalculation, and error correction. Expert validation by media specialists, subject matter experts, and vocational teachers yielded high feasibility ratings for content (87.5%), pedagogy (91.7%), and technical quality (87.5%). Effectiveness testing using paired-samples t-tests demonstrated significant improvements in students' tax literacy (p < 0.001) and critical thinking (p < 0.001), with stronger gains observed in tax literacy. Overall, the findings suggest that mobile learning grounded in work-based learning principles can strengthen vocational students' tax literacy while supporting higher-order cognitive processes and boundary-crossing competence by integrating workplace reasoning into vocational tax education. © 2026 The Authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Faculty of Economics and Business, State University of Malang, Malang, Indonesia; Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Darul Ulum University, Jombang, Indonesia
