Abstract
Studies on the determinants of school results have shown that they depend largely on the context of learning. Concerning the pandemic, teachers have been forced to find online teaching methods, which leads us to the central issue of this study of whether the effectiveness of online education depends on teachers’ digital skills. Therefore, in this study, we analyzed the perceived digital competences of Romanian pre-tertiary cycle teachers about their professional status, school location, gender, age, taught field, and prior participation in training for online teaching. Using data from 3,419 self-completed questionnaires in an online survey of teachers performed at the beginning of the global lockdown in March 2020, we have built two reliable measures of perceived digital skills, namely the Self-Assessed Multimedia and Online Skills Score (SMOS) and the Self-Assessed Digital Office Skills Score (SDOS), which were the dependent variables in our study. Hierarchical linear regressions were used to test the hypotheses regarding the variations of dependent variables, measuring the two concepts of self-assessed digital skills (SMOS and SDOS). These concepts underlined that both decrease with age and are positively affected by prior attendance at training sessions for online teaching skills and by having ICT and informatics as a taught subject field. However, teachers of all specialties are relatively significantly less skilled in this field. The most important results concern the impact of gender and professional status on the teachers’ self-assessed digital competences. In summary, it appears that self-assessed office digital skills are a specialism demonstrated mainly by female teachers, while multimedia and online skills are perceived by teachers to be a “male” domain. Simultaneously, net of the other variables, a higher status within the teaching profession correlates positively with perceived office digital skills. Lastly, implications for future research, as well as for educational interventions and policies, are discussed.
Highlights
All education systems aim to shape Students’ personalities, knowledge, and skills into their very best forms
Such a low explanatory power is due to the large size of the sample, the absence of some important predictors from the specifications of the models, e.g., home information and communication technologies (ICT) resources and ICT experience at home and outside of school, and the penalty incurred by many predictors when computing adjusted R2
Our specifications more effectively cover the variation of the Self-Assessed Digital Office Skills Score (SDOS) than the SelfAssessed Multimedia and Online Skills Score (SMOS)
Summary
All education systems aim to shape Students’ personalities, knowledge, and skills into their very best forms. Digitally skilled teachers cannot only do a better job in creating and distributing content as well as in communicating with their pupils, but they can increase the levels of academic achievement This rich communication from teacher to student is critical for student outcomes: studies have shown that students who have high levels of engagement have better grades and display better personal conduct, as well as higher levels of selfesteem and compliance with socially appropriate behaviors (Lam et al, 2014). It is associated with high rates of school completion (Veiga et al, 2012)
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