Digital data security awareness of teachers

Teachers who used to work with printed materials produce and keep the information in digital environment today thanks to information and communication technologies which are frequently used in all areas of our lives. The purpose of this study which has derived from the importance of sustaining digital data security of teachers, who use technology in educational activities, is to develop a scale in order to identify the digital data awareness of teachers who work in the schools of Ministry of Education, and to present the existing condition by means of the developed scale. The literature review and focus group interviews with critical partners led to an item pool of 93 statements. After the reviews of 12 field experts, piloting of the draft form was conducted with 79 teachers who were from different elementary, secondary and high schools. After the application process, incoherent items were taken out by the participants. An exploratory factor analysis was performed for the construct validity of the scale through the data collected from 529 teachers. The draft scale which consisted 56 items before the exploratory factor analysis turned into a single factor structure with 32 items. The internal consistency coefficient (Cronbach's Alpha=α) of the scale was .945 and the total variance was calculated as 36.053 %. A confirmatory factor analysis was carried out with 335 different participants in order to confirm the factor structure revealed in the exploratory factor analysis. The single factor structure which reached to ideal values by means of modification indexes proved the reliability and validity of digital data security awareness scale and its applicability for further studies. In order to identify the digital data security awareness of teachers, the data were collected through the developed scale from 1446 teachers in 29 different schools in Balıkesir province. Findings revealed that digital data security awareness of teachers were quite high with an average of 4.16. Teachers had more awareness regarding the importance of using letters, numbers and special characters when creating password, not considering the e-mails for identity confirmation (password, credit card, etc.) and providing unpredictable responses to the security questions for password reminder. On the other hand, the awareness was lower with regard to the issues of firewall software, security certificate of websites and the storage of data in Internet environment via several applications (Dropbox, Google drive, etc.) In this research, descriptive statistics with regard to some demographic variables and the relationship between these descriptive statistics and digital data security awareness were investigated and the results were interpreted. It was found that digital data security awareness of teachers varies with regard to gender, duration of daily computer use, duration of daily Internet use, having personal computer, tablet computer and smart phone. In the study, inadequate consideration on digital data security of the projects developed by the Ministry of Education and the things to be done in order to prevent data loss while using information technologies in educational activities were emphasized. The study can make a contribution to raise the awareness of teachers on digital data security, to direct studies to determine the contents of relevant in service training activities of the Ministry of Education, and can shed light on further research. Key Words: Teacher, Digital Data, Data Security, Data Security Awareness, Scale Development, Exploratory Factor Analysis, Confirmatory Factor Analysis