Students’ digital competenceBasque secondary school students’ digital competence development through EKI educational resource

Abstract

Digital competence has become a vital component of education in the 21st century and, as such, students need to be trained to meet its demands. In the Basque region of Spain, a digital competence exit profile for secondary school students has been defined, which is intended to be used alongside a newly created educational resource called EKI. There is scarce research that takes into account an educational resource to deal with digital competence. The study is based on the premise that EKI educational resource is an innovative educational resource whereby secondary school students develop their digital competence, and that digital competence is considered a crosscurricular competence for secondary school students. The overall aim of the dissertation is to analyse whether the use of EKI educational resource is sufficient to achieve the digital competence exit profile defined for Basque secondary school students. Firstly, it comprises a review of relevant research and theoretical foundation with regard to digital competence, focusing on the EKI educational resource for developing student digital competence in secondary education. Second, methodologically, the dissertation uses the exploratory design as research method with a descriptive approach to study the aspects of integration of digital competence in EKI educational resource. Secondary school students’ digital competence was in this study operationalised through three theoretically interrelated concepts; educational resource subjectlevel, digital competence area and digital competence proficiency level. Thirdly, the main research question has been operationalized through four sub-questions and each of them have been explored through an individual sub-study. The findings demonstrate the complex process to achieve the digital competence exit profile in secondary education using the EKI educational resource. Although all digital competence areas were identified through the activities, not all the areas are developed in the same way. In addition, while analysing the activities by school subject and digital competence area, results showed that some school subjects could facilitate the development of digital competences.