Identifying predictors of digital competence of educators and their impact on online guidance

Abstract

[EN] In the current sociohealth situation, new educational challenges have emerged, such as the need to implement a virtual tutorial action. Therefore, this study has three objectives: (1) to investigate the level of digital competence that early childhood and primary school teachers possess to carry out quality online tutorial actions; (2) to analyse whether there are diferences in use at both education stages; and (3) to identify which variables signifcantly afect the development of this competence at each educational stage. For this purpose, an ex post facto design was used, based on the survey technique, by means of nonprobabilistic purposive sampling. The fnal sample consisted of a total of 1,069 educators working at the early childhood and primary education stages, from all over Spain. The results showed acceptable digital competence, with higher scores in the primary education stage, which may be due to characteristics of the students and the education stage itself, rather than to teachers’ digital competences. On the other hand, it was found that the virtual tutorial action tasks are signifcantly infuenced in the early childhood education stage by blogs, WhatsApp, Facebook, and number of tutoring hours per month with families, while for the primary stage they are infuenced by blogs, WhatsApp, Twitter, ClassDojo, Moodle, tutoring hours, number of tutoring hours per month with families, and sex. Based on these results, there is an obvious need for educational institutions to continue to develop teacher training in relation to the use of resources to carry out adequate tutoring actions and thus increase the diversifcation in the use of resources.