Researching the experiences of education stakeholders on digital citizenship and education in social studies

The aim of this research is to determine the digital citizenship levels of education stakeholders (teachers, students and parents) and to investigate their experiences on digital citizenship education in social studies. In the research, explanatory sequential design from mixed method research was used. Within the scope of this design, first the quantitative data of the research and then the qualitative data were collected. In the research, the Digital Citizenship Scale was developed by the researcher for social studies teachers, secondary school 7th grade students and their parents in order to reveal the digital citizenship competencies of education stakeholders. A unique digital citizenship scale was developed for teachers with 4 factors and 21 items, with a total variance of 54,959%. For students, a digital citizenship scale was developed with 6 factors and 21 items, with a total explained variance of 51,033%. The digital citizenship scale developed for parents has 4 factors and 19 items and covers 60.037% of the total variance explained. The three unique constructs obtained were confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis. The scales obtained were examined for digital citizenship competencies based on the personal and demographic variables of the participant group. For the scales developed for teachers, secondary school students and parents, data were collected from 321 teachers, 1085 students and 1223 parents, respectively. Data on the qualitative dimension of the research were collected through semi-structured interviews and data were collected from 13 teachers, 44 students and 19 parents. In order to check whether the scales are suitable for data analysis, a normality test was performed with Kolmogorov Simirnov and the kurtosis-skewness coefficient was calculated. IBM SPSS 22 statistical program and AMOS 24 statistical program were used in the analysis of the quantitative data of the research. Qualitative data of the research were analyzed with Nvivo Plus Release 1.6.1. As a result of the research, there was no significant difference between the gender variable of teachers, students and parents and digital citizenship scale scores; there is a significant difference between the professional seniority of teachers and their digital citizenship levels regarding the "Protecting" dimension of the digital citizenship scale; students also stated that the source of the significant difference was related to the "Abilities to Use Technology" and "Respect" dimensions of the digital citizenship scale; It has been revealed that there is a significant difference between the dimensions of "Education and Communication", "Respect" and "Protecting" between teachers' daily internet use and their digital citizenship levels. Regarding the digital citizenship levels of the parents and the variables of daily internet use frequency, it was determined that there was a significant difference between all dimensions of the digital citizenship scale and the frequency of daily internet use. In the qualitative aspect of the research, teachers, students and parents define the concept of digital citizenship in a limited way through the characteristics of digital citizens, and they generally use digital devices such as smart phones, computers and tablets and platforms such as EBA, Morpa Campus, social media, and Google; digital technologies for fun, playing games, researching, surfing social media, etc. It has been found that they use the social studies course for teaching purposes and consider the social studies course important for the teaching of digital citizenship issues. In line with the results of the research, it can be suggested that social studies teachers can be given digital citizenship lessons within the scope of pre-service training, and seminars and conferences can be organized for parents on becoming a digital citizen.