Abstract:

This study presents results from a programming day initiative that was developed to increase digital competence among teacher students, with relatively small effort in terms of time and budget. The results show an increased understanding of materials and toolkits available to them, but also collected data on the teacher students own perceived digital competence.

The programming day initiative is a concrete outcome initiated by an expert group at Södertörn University in Sweden, where one has understood the recent change in the Swedish school curriculum July 1, 2018 [1] to challenge teacher education. For example, when digital competence was added to the curriculum there is a demand to train future teachers in those skills so they possess the same competence when teaching pupils [2].

To meet these changes in the curriculum, the programming day initiative focused on 42 students from teacher education grades 4-6, enrolled between 2016 and 2017. Our assumption was, as they are currently at the end of their education, it is reasonable to expect them to be well aware of the addition of digital competence. During the day the teacher students explored several materials and commercial toolkits (i.e. LittleBits, Micro:bits and Makey Makey), which can be used in classroom contexts. Common to these toolkits are that they are created to introduce digitization and computational thinking.

To measure the outcome of the day, we distributed pre- and post-questionnaires to all students, with nine questions in each. In the pre-questionnaire the students were among other issues asked to respond to the claim “I believe that my own digital competence is high” with agreement along a five graded scale from low (1) to high (5). The results showed that 45% of the students declared their digital competence to be high (4-5 on the scale), 43% neutral (3), and 13% valued it to be low or none (1-2). This is put in contrast with the claim in the post-questionnaire collected at the end of the workshop day “I believe that my own digital competence has increased during the day”, where 48% of the students declared a high agreement (4-5 on the scale), 36% neutral (3), and 17% declared low or no agreement (1-2).

This positive effect from the activity showed that more than half of the students experienced that their digital competence increased. This was also seen in their attitude towards programming: before the workshop was given, programming was considered the least important for digital competence among four alternatives, and after the workshop 76% of the students considered it important to expose pupils to programming in order to increase their digital competence. In conclusion, the findings shows that with a limited budget and with restricted time, even relatively small efforts have measurable effects and are beneficial for increasing teacher students' digital competence.

References:
[1] Skolverket (2018) Läroplan för grundskolan, förskoleklassen och fritidshemmet. Styrdokument. ISBN: 978-913832733-3
[2] Lärarnas Riksförbund 2016. Digital framtid utan fallgropar: En undersökning om lärares och elevers digitala kompetens. Technical Report #2016–10.

Keywords:

Digital competence, teacher education, education technology, toolkits.