Abstract:

This paper presents a research carried out by the Department of Human Sciences and Education of the University of Perugia (Italy).

The research has used a semi-structured questionnaire interview administered to teachers aimed at analyzing their beliefs and expectations about the use of ICT in teaching and the perception of the importance of training to digital competences, in order to better characterize the future training.
A number of “first cycle” (primary and secondary levels of schools) and kindergarten teachers working in Umbria (a region of Italy) participated in the action research project named “Didattica inclusiva e nativi digitali” (“Inclusive Education and Digital Natives”). The project had been designed to test and support innovative teaching that, through the use of ICTs, could enable pupils to develop and implement the key competences foreseen in the student’s profile at the end of the first order of school. The project was funded by the School Office of the Umbrian region.
At the project end the involved teachers were invited to fill in the questionnaire anonymously, via the Moodle platform that was suitability prepared (“Questionnaire” tool).

The questionnaire was articulated in three parts. The first one covered general information and allowed collecting data such as gender, age, education, work years in the school, school cycle, taught discipline, years of computer use, Broadband Wireless Access, role within the action research project (teacher, expert tutor or training teacher) participation in training courses on ICT, content of the courses eventually attended and duration in hours of training on ICT.

The second part was devoted to ICT in the teaching-learning process; using a 5-point scale the teachers’ agreement or disagreement with beliefs and expectations regarding the use of ICT in teaching as well as beliefs and expectations about the educational benefits of ICT were investigated.
The third part of the questionnaire intended to measure the perception of the importance of the teacher training on digital competence;using a 5-point scale some dimensions considered as fundamental in the teacher digital competence (technology literacy, access and use of information, communication and collaboration, digital citizenship, creativity and innovation) were investigated. The latter part of the questionnaire was inspired by the doctoral research carried on by Santiago Mengual-Andrés at the University of Alicante,which also allowed implementing a fruitful cooperation between the Spanish and the Italian universities.

This paper also presents in detail the results of the questionnaire filled in by 141 teachers, for the most part (60%) working at the primary school, using computer on average since 16 years and who mostly (73%) have already attended an ICT-based training.

Keywords:

Digital competence, ICT, teachers, questionnaire.