The relationship between lifelong learning tendencies and digital literacy levels of pre-service teachers (A Düzce University sample)

The study aims to examine the relationship between the lifelong learning tendencies and the digital literacy levels of pre-service teachers. The methodology of the study is the correlational survey model among the quantitative research methods. The population of the study consists of pre-service teachers studying at Faculty of Education, Duzce University, Turkey during the spring term of 2018-2019 academic year. The sample of the research determined by the methodology of simple random sampling, includes 500 pre-service teachers. The "Lifelong Learning Trends Scale (LLTS)" developed by Diker Coskun (2009) and the "Digital Literacy Scale (DLS) developed by Ng (2012) and translated to Turkish by Hamutoğlu et al. (2017) were used as data collection instruments. According to the findings of the research, there was no statistically significant difference between the pre-service teachers' scores regarding lifelong learning trends according to grade level and age; however, there was a statistically significant difference between gender, department and daily internet use. When the scores of the pre-service teachers on digital literacy levels were examined, it was resulted that there was no statistically significant difference according to daily internet use, but there was a statistically significant difference on those scores with regard to gender, grade, age and department. Also, it was found that there was a moderate positive linear relationship between the lifelong tendencies and the digital literacy levels of pre-service teachers. According to this, it was concluded that as the lifelong learning trends of the pre-service teachers increased, the digital literacy levels of the pre-service teachers were also increasing.