Abstract:

Students applying to higher education institutions in the Republic of Croatia have different background knowledge of informatics. The existing curricula for the primary and secondary education and inadequate status of informatics as an extracurricular activity and only elective subject in the primary education in the Republic of Croatia cause the great variety. Some of today's higher education students attended the informatics in the primary education in grades 4 to 8 (5 years) and throughout the secondary education (4 years), while the others did do not attend it in the primary education at all, and in the secondary education only in the 1st grade.

This paper examines the attendance of the present University of Zagreb - Faculty of Teacher Education students to subject informatics in their primary and secondary education, their satisfaction with the knowledge of informatics gained in the primary and secondary education, their interest in informatics, the extent to which their current informatics knowledge meets their informatics needs, which informatics fields they find most interesting, in order to better adapt the contents and the scope of the starting higher education informatics courses to the students' needs.

The population consists of full-time students of the Integrated Teaching Study at the Faculty of Teacher Education of the University of Zagreb, N=1308. The descriptive statistics is used on a sample consisting of n=218 students, with a significance of 95% and a confidence interval of 6.06%. Data were collected in May 2015 using the online questionnaire (Google Forms) and processed by GNU PSPP (http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp).

Some of research results show that total of 46 students (21.10%) did not attend the subject informatics in the primary education at all and at that time they were formally computer and information illiterate. The total of 119 students (54.58%) attended the subject informatics continuously from 5th to 8th grade (4 years). In the high school total of 67 students (30.73%) attended the subject informatics only in the first grade and total of 62 students (28.44%) attended the subject informatics in all four grades of high school.

The research results show that there is a need to improve the primary and secondary education curricula of the Republic of Croatia through the introduction of the compulsory subject of informatics in grades 5 to 8 in the primary education and 1 to 4 in the secondary education. The curriculum of the Integrated Teaching Study at the Faculty of Teacher Education of the University of Zagreb should also be improved by increased number of compulsory informatics courses in order to cover all the relevant informatics areas in which the students are interested in, and thus significantly improve their computer and information literacy.

Keywords:

Education, curriculum, computer and information literacy.