Abstract:

Integral parts of digital competence are knowledge about, skills, and attitudes toward ethical behaviour in cyberspace. Key words of such issues are fraud, piracy, authorship and copyright. Someone cannot expect that fraudulent behaviours are going to expire by chance and self-education; more reasonable is to expect that they can be challenged through formal educational system, promoting ethical access, use and reuse of information and digital resources. Intention of our work was to assemble a short questionnaire what can be used as an instrument of initial assessment of opinions about a number of unethical behaviors with use of ICT, what should be challenged by educators. According to the postulates of constructivist pedagogies knowledge of preexisting conceptions is obligate. The reason is that they form a basis for improvement of knowledge, and at the same time, misconceptions can work as an obstacle to accept new ideas. Questionnaire was tested on a sample of 400 15 – 16-years old adolescents from a number of Slovenian secondary schools. Questionnaire has appropriate reliability (alpha = 0,83). By the use of Principal Component Analysis it was revealed that a scale consist of two components, explaining 56,6% of the variance. The first component is formed from items, where most of the students find such behavior as unacceptable (e.g. Assembling fake Facebook profile; Preparation of a work and presented it without credits). The second component is comprised from items what can be recognized as piracy (e.g. downloading music and videos; using pirated computer programmes). Majority of students find such behavior as acceptable. Differences between boys and girls, calculated as effect sizes, are in most cases small or even insignificant. Only two items from the second component (piracy) minimally passed medium threshold (r > 0,3), where such behaviors are more acceptable for boys.

Keywords:

Ethical behaviour, digital competence, scale validation.