The relationship between ICT self-efficacy and ICT skills and activities: A pilot study among Czech upper secondary school students

Abstract

Self-efficacy is an important concept that may be used to understand students' confidence and beliefs about their competencies to perform tasks. In the field of ICT, more attention is currently being paid to this concept.

Our aim was to investigate the relationship between students' ICT self-efficacy (ICT SE) and their ICT activities. Our sample consisted of N=166 respondents from four different types of Czech upper secondary schools.

Questions for the ICT SE were based on the DigComp framework (Information and Data, Communication and Collaboration, Digital Content Creation, Safety, and Problem-Solving). We found a relationship between ICT SE and some ICT activities which students do very often out of school (blogging, web page design, computer graphics, etc.).

The relationship between students' beliefs about their competencies to perform ICT activities was stronger for Communication and Collaboration, Digital Content Creation and Safety. We also found a correlation between ICT SE in information and ICT SE in content creation.

The results indicated a correlation between ICT SE in Communication and Collaboration, respectively Problem-Solving and English Language school grades. To understand the relationship between ICT SE and ICT skills better, we recommend analysing students' reporting style using different methods, for example, the anchoring vignette.