Evaluation of social studies teachers' perceptions of digital literacy skills

Today's world is changing rapidly compared to previous periods. One of the biggest reasons for this change is the use of technology in many areas such as daily life, professional life and education life and its digital transformation. The development of technology has led to the emergence of new skills in education. One of the newly emerging skills is digital literacy skill. The purpose of this study is to investigate the digital literacy skills of social studies teachers and to help them integrate these skills into their future teaching with the help of technologies and tools offered in digital literacy education. This study aims to provide in-depth accounts of social studies teachers' digital literacy skills: therefore, the main focus of the study is on social studies teachers' experiences and practices related to their digital literacy knowledge and understanding, and their use and development of digital tools and technologies in social studies teaching. In this study, which aims to examine digital literacy skills in social studies education based on the views of social studies teachers and variables, descriptive method from quantitative research models was used. The study group of the research consists of social studies teachers working in Sultanbeyli district of Istanbul province in the 2023-2024 academic year. A total of 156 social studies teachers participated in the study. Volunteerism was taken into consideration in the inclusion of teachers in the study. Data were obtained through face-to-face questionnaire collection. The Digital Literacy scale developed by Bayrakcı and Narmanlıoğlu (2021) was used as a data collection tool in the study. Data analysis was carried out on the data within the scope of SPSS 24 programme. Mean, standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis values of the variables in the study were calculated and nonparametric tests were used since the data did not show normal. The significance level p:0,05 was accepted in all analyses. It was tried to determine the level of digital literacy perceptions of teachers. In line with the method used and the results of the data, according to the age variable, teachers with a professional seniority of 25 years and below, 0-5 years are higher than other age groups. It was determined that the digital literacy perceptions of master's degree and non-thesis master's degree teachers were higher, there was no significant difference in digital literacy and all its dimensions according to the variable of 'having a computer, tablet mobile smartphone', while the digital literacy perceptions of teachers with continuous internet connection and all its dimensions were higher. It was determined that digital literacy education teachers had higher digital literacy levels. According to these results, it can be concluded that there is a close relationship between digital literacy level and being intimate with technological devices.