Abstract:

Computer science in secondary education in the Republic of Croatia is a compulsory subject for all high school students. The curriculum prescribes the number of teaching hours for a particular program of secondary schooling. Because of the differences that arise on the basis of different secondary school orientations, computer science teaching, although compulsory, has a different number of teaching hours that are distributed differently in different programs. Nonetheless, every Croatian high school student had to attend a certain number of lesson hours of computer science during his high school education. By enrolling a college, every high school student should have minimal knowledge and skills in information technology. For this reason, a questionnaire survey was carried out to examine the attitudes of students (N = 94) of the Faculty of Humanities and social sciences of the University of Zagreb (which are enrolled in various study programs for future teachers) about the high school computer science. Main goal of this study was to determine the importance students attributed to this compulsory subject on the basis of expressed attitudes: about this subject, the school year in which it should start, the number of lesson hours that students should attend and the particular IT knowledge and skills that would be crucial to future professional work. Majority of respondents expressed attitude that computer science should be compulsory subject in secondary school and that it should taught from 1st grade. They also think that computer science should be taught in 210 lecture hours during secondary school. Respondents expressed that most important categories of IT knowledge and skills for their student’s future professional work are text processing (83%), internet (74%), presentations (68.09%) and computer basics (55%).

Keywords:

IT knowledge, IT skills, computer science, future teachers.