Designing, implementation and evaluation of digital citizenship curriculum

As a result of the rapid development of the internet and technology, digitalization has emerged. Digitalization has led to significant transformations in both individual and societal contexts. With our daily tasks being carried out through digital environments, citizenship has become one of the most obvious areas where this transformation has occurred, and the concept of digital citizenship has emerged. In order to raise conscious digital citizens for today's digital societies, digital citizenship education has become a social and individual need. In this regard, this study aims to design, implement, and evaluate a digital citizenship curriculum for university students. The method of the study is a mixed method, and the design is a mixed method curriculum evaluation design. According to this design, different methods were used at different stages of the study. A survey study was used in the needs assessment phase, an exploratory sequential design, one of the mixed methods, was used in the scale development phase, a survey method was used in the achievement test development phase, and an embedded experimental mixed design was used in the implementation and evaluation of the curriculum. The study group of the pilot study consisted of 34 first-grade university students in the spring semester of 2021-2022 academic year while the study group of the implementation stage consisted of 30 first-year university students in the spring semester of 2021-2022 academic year. Quantitative data was collected using a digital citizenship awareness scale, a digital citizenship achievement test developed by the researcher, and the "Attitude Scale for Digital Technology" developed by Cabı (2016). Qualitative data was collected using need assessment interview forms, researcher journal, student journal, observer journal, and semi-structured interview forms. In the data analysis, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, item difficulty and item discrimination analyses, KR-20 item reliability analysis, and related measurement t-test analyses were used for quantitative data while content analysis was used for qualitative data. According to the findings of the study, the developed curriculum had a statistically significant effect on university students' digital citizenship achievements, digital citizenship awareness, and attitudes towards digital technologies. As a result, a digital citizenship curriculum for university students has been added to the literature within the scope of this study.