To understand the difference between primary and secondary teachers in the implementation of the digital education curriculum, this research aims to study and compare their digital technologies’ uses, their sense of self-efficacy for teaching digital education and in teaching with digital technologies. This study investigates the difference between primary and secondary teachers concerning their self-efficacy for teaching digital education and in teaching with digital technologies and their uses of digital technologies.
A questionnaire was administered to 108 primary and 58 secondary teachers who graduated in 2020 across five French-speaking cantons in Switzerland. To grasp the variety of digital technology uses employed by beginning teachers, a typology of 20 digital technology uses was introduced drawing on the research of Ortoleva et al. (2017). A scale of sense of self-efficacy for teaching digital education, based on the learning goals of the digital education curriculum was developed. Regarding the frequencies of digital uses,
significant differences between primary and secondary teachers were noticed for the use of programming software, picture and communication. Moreover, results show that secondary teachers feel significatively more competent for teaching digital education than primary teachers. In contrast, primary teachers feel significatively more capable of managing activities with digital technologies than secondary teachers. To examine the relation between teacher’s sense of self-efficacy for teaching digital education and in teaching with digital technologies and the digital technology uses, simple linear regressions were executed. Sense of self-efficacy for teaching digital education was the only variable statistically significant to predict digital technology uses for both cohorts. These results show the importance of enhancing teacher’s confidence in teaching digital education.