Teacher collaboration and students’ digital competence - evidence from the SELFIE tool

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the relationship between students’ digital competence acquisition, teaching practices, and teacher professional learning activities. We analysed insights provided by 59,452 teachers through SELFIE, an online self-reflection tool for schools’ digital capacity. Using ordinary least squares regressions with school fixed effects, we focus on students’ digital competence and find that the use of digital technologies in cross-curricular projects is the teaching practice most related to the acquisition of students’ digital competence. On the other hand, we also find that teachers’ participation in teacher networks is highly correlated with the implementation of cross-curricular projects with digital technologies. The results further suggest that the use of digital technologies for teacher collaboration (in professional learning activities and in implementing cross-curricular projects) can have great potential and importance in the digital age, both for teachers and learners.

KEYWORDS:

• Computer literacy
• educational cooperation
• teacher development
• training needs
• self evaluation (individuals)

Acknowledgments

The European Commission has funded this research. The authors would like to thank the colleagues from the European Commission´s Joint Research centre who provided feedback on early versions of the paper: Nikoleta Giannoutsou, Romina Cachia, Lilian Weikert, and Yves Punie. Thanks also go to the members of the SELFIE community who contributed to the development, testing and implementation of the tool. Finally, special thanks go to the thousands of school leaders, teachers and students who have used the tool so far to reflect on the digital capacity of their schools.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Notes

1. We define teachers’ professional learning as an overarching term that includes intentional learning activities aiming to improve teaching practices and learning outcomes. Professional learning activities vary in their degree of structure. They range from a well-structured format (e.g. courses or workshops) to less structured formats (e.g. participation in networks or peer learning). Usually, structured activities are also referred as continuous professional development by the literature (see: Darling-Hammond, Hyler, and Gardner 2017).

2. Based on the concepts of organisational capability (Killen, Beetham, and Knight 2017) and schools digital maturity (Balaban, Redjep, and Calopa 2018) we define digital capacity as the extent to which culture, policies, infrastructure as well as digital competence of students and staff support the effective integration of technology in teaching and learning practices (Costa, Castano-Munoz, and Kampylis 2021).

3. ISCED refers to the International Standard Classification of Education. ISCED 2 refers to lower secondary and ISCED 3 to upper-secondary.

4. The OECD-31 average is 40%.

5. For example, in Iceland teachers can now get official professional learning credit for their participation in online communities and reportedly, school heads are happy with it (Vuorikari 2019).

6. https://ec.europa.eu/education/schools-go-digital_en

7. In the scale, 1- indicates strong disagreement and 5- strong agreement. A sixth option was offered to allow indicating that a question is not applicable in respondent’s context. This last option was marked as missing in our analysis.

8. Based on the theoretical framework entitled European Framework of Digitally-Competent Educational Organisations (DigCompOrg).

9. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre collects aggregated data with all responses of participants that is used for research purposes. The authors were given access to the data and the analyses performed for this paper fully comply with the data protection and privacy policy of SELFIE (available at https://ec.europa.eu/education/tools/selfie/privacy_en) that foresees the use of aggregated and anonymised data collected through the tool for publications.

10. In SELFIE, a school comprises one ISCED level.

11. This method estimates the relationship by minimising the sum of the squares in the difference between the observed and predicted values of the dependent variable shaped as a straight line and is adequate to the kind of variables used in this study. More information can be found at Wooldridge (2016).

12. The six items composing the index have been validated as an area using Confirmatory Factor Analysis in (Costa, Castano-Munoz, and Kampylis 2021).

13. For instance, in the case of a school that offers ISCED levels 1, 2 and 3 three dummy variables were included: school * ISCED1, school * ISCED2, and school * ISCED 3.

14. More information can be found at Taylor and Von Fintel (2016).

15. Results are available on request from the authors.

16. For robustness check we also run this model adding control variables referring to teachers’ digital competence in order to check if the competence level could influence the results (see Table 3). The results obtained are in line with the ones from model (1).

17. We present results for all teachers, but results are robust if we run the regression only including those teachers who have participated in all the proposed professional learning activities in the last year. Therefore, results remain stable if we limit our sample to teachers included in equation (2).

18. Results from the same model with variables referring to professional learning participation are consistent and show that participation in professional networks is the activity that is most related to the implementation of cross-curricular activities using ICT. Results are available upon request to the authors.

19. For all analyses presented in this section robustness checks were performed in order to check if teachers’ age group and experience could influence the results. The findings were very similar to the ones from this section and no significant heterogeneous effects were found.

20. See https://www.etwinning.net/en/pub/get-inspired/projects.cfm and https://www.etwinning.net/en/pub/get-inspired/kits.cfm for an example of a detailed guide on pedagogical design of cross-curricular projects.

21. More details can be provided by the authors upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Directorate-General for Education and Culture [JRC Ref. 35346-2018 // EAC 2018-0747].

Notes on contributors

Jonatan Castaño Muñoz

Jonatan Castaño Muñoz, PhDis a researcher at the Joint Research Center of the European Commission from where he gives scientific evidence to inform European educational policies. Jonatan is part of the Human Capital and Employment Unit and his research is focused on education and skilling, especially on the use of digital technologies in school, higher, and adult education. His research is not only interested in the pedagogical dimension of the use of digital technologies in education but also in the socio-economic implications that this use entails. Jonatan has a degree in political sciences, a master in applied social research techniques, and an interdisciplinary PhD in ‘Information and Knowledge Society’. He also contributes regularly to conferences and journals in his research fields.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6112-2728

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jcastanom

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonatan-castaño-muñoz-3a264043/

Researchgate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jonatan_Castano-Munoz

Riina Vuorikari

Riina Vuorikari, PhD joined the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission in July 2013. She contributes to research and policy support in the field of digitalisation of education and training, and is interested in innovation in education. Her work focuses on Digital Competence for Citizens and Teacher Professional Development, especially through teacher networks. Her new themes cover areas such as Educational Makerspaces and AI in Education, but also impact evaluations.

Riina has degrees in education (M.Ed in 1998 in Finland) and hypermedia (DEA in 1999 in France). Her PhD, which was completed in 2009, is from the Dutch research school for Information and Knowledge Systems. Since 1999, she has worked in the field of digital education. Her main interest is dealing with issues related to the adoption of new technologies and innovation in education. Before joining the JRC in Sevilla, she worked as a Project Manager and Research Analyst. Many of her clients were based in Brussels, including educational organisations such as European Schoolnet, and national and regional education authorities (e.g. Ministry of Education).

Patrícia Costa

Patrícia Costa, PhD is a researcher at the Center for Mathematics Applied to Economic Forecasting and Decision (CEMAPRE). She worked as a scientific officer at European Commission´s Joint Research Centre (JRC) from 2011 to 2020 where she contributed to research and policy support in the areas of Educational Assessment, Applied Statistics, Comparative Education and Psychometrics. She has been a data analyst and psychometrician in the Human Capital and Employed Unit. At the JRC her research was focused on secondary data analysis of international large-scale surveys and on the validation of instruments. She has also been involved in supporting the Commission by providing technical expertise in statistical analyzes of student and adult skills. In addition, she regularly organizes workshops and serves as a scientific committee member.

Patrícia holds a Ph. D in the area of Psychometrics/Statistics and received a master and bachelor degrees in Mathematics. Before joining the JRC, Patrícia was a researcher at the Laboratory of Applied and Computational Statistics in Portugal. There she worked on a School Effectiveness project in the area of Mathematics and in this context she developed new Item Response Theory methods. She also worked as a Mathematics and Statistics university professor.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2943-4270

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patricia-costa-531517bb/

Ralph Hippe

Ralph Hippe, PhD is an expert at Cedefop. Previously he was a scientific officer in the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), leading the SELFIE tool in the area of vocational education and training. Moreover, he has worked for the London School of Economics, Sciences Po Strasbourg and University of Tübingen, and has been a consultant for the World Bank and a visiting researcher at IDDRI/Sciences Po Paris. Hippe holds a PhD in economics from University of Strasbourg, BETA/CNRS and University of Tübingen (summa cum laude). He was awarded four dissertation awards for his PhD thesis on human capital and economic growth. He also holds Master’s degrees in business administration and management from Ecole de Management Strasbourg and University of Tübingen.

Panagiotis Kampylis

Panagiotis Kampylis, PhD is a Senior Research Fellow at the Italian National Research Council – Institute for Educational Technology. He worked as a scientific officer and team lead at European Commission´s Joint Research Centre (JRC) from January 2012 to August 2020. He has led the design, development, testing and implementation of SELFIE tool for schools´ digital capacity since its inception until August 2020. He graduated from Jyvaskyla University (Finland) in 2010 with his PhD in Cognitive Science (thesis on fostering creative thinking in education settings). His research interests include creativity and innovation in education and training, technology-enhanced learning, arts-education, computational thinking and digital and entrepreneurship competences. Before joining the JRC in 2012, Panagiotis worked many years as a primary school teacher, music teacher, head teacher, teacher trainer and creativity researcher. He has been an invited speaker at various events in the field of education, training, and lifelong learning. His scientific publications have been cited widely (see at https://bit.ly/3brr04y).

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1760-0347

Website: www.pankampylis.eu

Twitter: https://twitter.com/pankampylis

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pankampylis/