Turkish Adaptation of Digital Literacy Scale and Investigating Pre-service Science Teachers' Digital Literacy

Abstract

The shortest description of digital literacy is the one made by Eshet-Alkalai (2004) as; "survival skill in the digital era". According to Ng (2012) the indicator of an individual's being digital literate is her/his adaptation to the new or emerging technologies. Therefore, it is important for the 21st century humanity to develop digital literacy skills. Today, countries are aware of the fact that the quality of education has a big role in shaping their future so they review their education policies accordingly. In this regard, they pace for the sake of benefiting from technology in education. In Turkey, the main aim of the FATIH Project (Movement of Enhancing Opportunities and Improving Technology), carried out by Turkish Ministry of National Education since 2010, is to increase technological opportunities in schools and effectively integrate technology into educational environments. A plethora of research have emphasized that the project increases the technological opportunities however there are deficiencies in its usage in educational environments effectively. The most important stakeholders that influence the success of the project are teachers and the students. Determining the digital literacy skills of teachers, preservice teachers and students is important in terms of developing the required teacher education programs. Therefore, one of the aims of this research was to adapt the digital literacy scale developed by Ng (2012) into Turkish and the other was to investigate pre-service science teachers' digital literacy. 979 junior and senior pre-service science teachers from 13 state universities participated in the research. Factor loadings of the scale items varied between 0.46 and 0.74 in according to the exploratory factor analysis result. In the scale; 10 items fall into one factor and explain 40% of the total variability. Cronbach Alpha reliability score is 0.86. The adapted version of the digital literacy scale is determined as valid and reliable. According to the findings related to the second aim of the study, the digital literacy skills of pre-service science teachers seem generally qualified.