Digital knowledge of trainee teachers. Evaluation at a Mexican school

Abstract

In the current educational context, acquiring digital skills to foster critical citizenship is one of the premises of the school curriculum at its different levels. Therefore, this research seeks the theoretical-methodological construct of digital knowledge, proposed by Ramírez and Casillas in 2014 which characterizes the management, use and interpretation of ICTs in four main dimensions: 1) administration of digital systems, 2) creation and manipulation, 3) socialization and 4) information management. Thus, the findings are based on an assessment of trainee teachers’ digital knowledge or what in Mexico is called normalists, which aims to identify the levels of digital literacy, citizenship, legal digital practices and critical thinking of trainee teachers of basic education. The research was implemented at a teaching training institution (Normal School) located in Baja California, South of Mexico. The sample was simple random composed by 119 subjects divided by career advancement (high university and low university) since, it was based on the hypothesis that digital knowledge is related to years of schooling, that is, the more knowledge is acquired through the years, the higher is the students’ digital knowledge. An exploratory factor (KMO and Bartlett's test of sphericity) and t-Student were performed for the analysis. The findings account for partial incidence from the crosstab variables in some of the study categories.