Digital Competence, Teacher Self-Efficacy and Training Needs

Computing related content is introduced in school curricula all over the world, placing new requirements on school teachers and their knowledge. Little attention has been paid to fostering the skills and attitudes required to teach the new content. This involves not only traditional computing topics, such as algorithms or programming, but also the role of technology in society as well as questions related to ethics, safety and integrity. As technology develops at a fast rate, so does the content to be taught. Learning computing content through isolated in-service training initiatives is by no means enough, but rather, teachers need to develop confidence to independently and continuously explore what is new, what is relevant and how to include digital competence in their teaching. Teachers' self-efficacy is hence of crucial importance. In a previous article \citenorden2017 we described the development of a self-efficacy scale for teachers, focusing on digital competence as described in EU's framework DigComp 2.0. In this paper, we extend that work by analysing 530 teachers' responses collected in Autumn 2017 during a series of workshops and other professional development events. Our goal was to collect baseline data, painting a picture of teachers' current self-efficacy levels in order to facilitate follow-up studies. In addition, our results also point out challenging areas, consequently providing important insight into what topics and themes should be emphasized in professional development initiatives.