An investigation of the views of students about information technology and software course's curri̇culum in the context of digital citizenship

This study examines the students' views about curriculum of Information Technologies and Software (ITS) course in the context of digital citizenship. Research population includes fifth and sixth grade students who proceed their secondary school in the central district of Adana in 2014-2015 education year. For pilot study, two by two schools from each statue in total six schools, which are identified as low, middle and upper socio- economic status by unbiased cluster sampling method, were selected from research population. Three schools that are from each status were selected for the main study. . The pilot study of the research is conducted on 311 students; 97 of them from the schools which have upper socio economic status, 118 of them from the schools which have middle socio- economic status and 96 of them from the schools which have low socio-economic status. The main study was conducted on 264 students; 84 of them from the schools which have upper socio- economic status and 93 of them from the schools which have middle socio- economic status and 87 of them from the schools which have low socio-economic status. In this research, data were gathered by using the scale of Digital Citizenship in Information Technologies and Software (ITS-DCS) course which was developed by the researcher in this study. In data analysis, descriptive statistics were examined by means of SPSS 21 package software. Furthermore; independent samples t-test and one-way analysis of variance were used. In evaluating the findings in being meaningful or not; 0.5 significance level is determined as a criteria. It is identified that the sample meets the premises for "linearity" and "normality" before the analysis was done. According to the findings of ITS-DCS, effect of the ITS course in contribution to gaining the knowledge, skills and values related to dimension of digital ethics-law and, rights and responsibilities depending on these is over the average. While contribution of the ITS course to gaining knowledge, skills and values related to the dimension of digital literacy is slightly below the average; it is slightly over the average for dimensions of digital security and digital communication. When the students' ITS-DCS scores compared according to their demographic information, it was found that there was no difference between these scores in terms of their grades and gender. On the other hand, there was significant difference between the contribution level of ITS course on students' gaining digital citizenship knowledge, skills and values in terms of their family income, their parents' education level, socio-economic status of their schools and whether they have a computer and internet at home or not (p<.05) keywords: Digital citizenship, digital citizenship scale in information technologies and software course