Digital Competencies: Are Pre-Service Teachers Qualified for Digital Education?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46328/ijemst.2842Keywords:
Digital literacy, Digital education, Initial teacher programme, Teacher candidate, Twenty-first century teacher, Saudi higher educationAbstract
This study examines digital competency (DigComp) as a crucial component of twenty-first century teachers. It investigates pre-service teachers’ level of DigComp from their perspective, and whether they felt their preparation programme qualified them for digital education. One hundred forty student teachers in their final year of majoring in either art education or kindergarten at a public university in Saudi Arabia participated. Data was collected via an online survey that included five DigComp areas: information and data literacy, communication and collaboration, digital content creation, safety, and problem-solving. Significant differences were found between the two groups: the communication and collaboration domain had the highest mean in both groups (152.47+19.39; 139.40+ 17.79); while the safety domain had the lowest mean score in both groups (16.48+2.62; 15.06+3.35). Results showed that 77.1% of pre-service teachers rated their DigComp as excellent and 22.9% rated it as moderate. The results further revealed that the pre-service teacher programme was average (65.04%) in qualifying pre-service teachers to integrate technology into their future teaching practices. The results of this study highlight the necessity to evaluate pre-service teacher programmes for suitability to produce instructors who possess the cognitive, teaching, and digital competencies required in the era of technology.Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Articles may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Authors alone are responsible for the contents of their articles. The journal owns the copyright of the articles. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of the research material.
The author(s) of a manuscript agree that if the manuscript is accepted for publication in the journal, the published article will be copyrighted using a Creative Commons “Attribution 4.0 International” license. This license allows others to freely copy, distribute, and display the copyrighted work, and derivative works based upon it, under certain specified conditions.
Authors are responsible for obtaining written permission to include any images or artwork for which they do not hold copyright in their articles, or to adapt any such images or artwork for inclusion in their articles. The copyright holder must be made explicitly aware that the image(s) or artwork will be made freely available online as part of the article under a Creative Commons “Attribution 4.0 International” license.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
