Communicating and Collaborating with Others through Digital Competence: A Self-Perception Study Based on Teacher Trainees’ Gender

Abstract

Digital competence in teaching can be understood as the set of skills, attitudes and abilities to use technologies critically and creatively, both in the personal and professional environment. Likewise, it is one of the eight key competencies for lifelong learning. In this paper, in line with the Common Digital Competence Framework (DigComp), we analyze the self-perception of teacher trainees’ digital competence to communicate and collaborate with other people. Additionally, we state the existence of statistically significant differences from a gender perspective (women/men). In this sense, we have carried out non-experimental quantitative research that has a descriptive nature. To this end, we used a questionnaire as an instrument for collecting information, with a total sample of 698 pre-service teachers in Andalusia (Spain). The results show that teacher trainees have an intermediate level in terms of their abilities to communicate and collaborate with other people through digital technologies. At the same time, significant differences are highlighted regarding participants’ gender, which implies that gender can still be considered a limitation in the use of ICTs, thereby decreasing participants’ digital competence. Finally, this study sheds light on the need to improve future teachers’ digital competence.

Perspectives on Digital Competencies in University: What’s Ahead for Education?

“…There is also evidence of digital competences in the application of languages whose results were successful in terms of coherence and cohesion, content, vocabulary adequacy and richness as well as grammatical correctness (Mykytiuk et al, 2023). This is how digital competencies came to impose themselves and interact with society and even more to interact, collaborate and have the way to communicate among teachers to perform all kinds of academic activities despite having an intermediate level of training in digital competencies (Rodríguez-García et al, 2022) before the trainings and with the passage of time to have all the technology at hand. Through the training of digital competencies, teachers also managed to develop strategies of ways to evaluate and how to develop the digital competencies of students (Fernández et al, 2022) since digital literacy was and will be an urgent social need for all types of application and especially in education for its advantages and characteristics (Zainab et al, 2023).…”

Attitudes of participants in digital communication in higher education on the importance of social skills and innovative teaching methods in the teaching process

“…Numerous other studies and research projects have also explored the role of digital communication in the educational process (see Park, & Yang, 2013;Khan et al, 2017;Makhzoum et al, 2021, Scheuermann & Pedró, 2009Griffin & McGraw, 2012). Some scholars, like Rodríguez-García et al (2022) and Johanson et al (2023), investigated the relationship between communication procedures and student achievement. They observed a direct connection between student achievement and effective teacher communication.…”

Optimizing expected policy outcomes through creative problem structuring: Police human resource development policy in the southeast Sulawesi regional police, Indonesia

“…To streamline the implementation of its responsibilities, the state apparatus needs to have a set of capabilities that enable superior performance in different situations. These abilities not only include threshold abilities such as experience, knowledge and basic cognitive abilities, but also distinguishing abilities such as systems thinking (Boyatzis, 2008), credibility (Schlesinger, Nagi, & Kremnitzer, 2017), cultural competence (Gonçalves & Matos, 2016), and digital competence (Rodríguez-García, Cardoso-Pulido, De la Cruz-Campos, & Martínez-Heredia, 2022). However, these distinguishing competencies are contextual (Mulder, 2011) and driven by the needs of the organizational environment (Boyatzis, 2008).…”