Digital competence of teachers in the use of ICT for research work: development of an instrument from a PLS-SEM approach.

All spheres of our life are being affected using technology, particularly its integration in the research processes carried out by teachers. The success of the integration of specific digital resources in research work can be affected by several factors, such as: digital skills for finding information, managing it, analyzing it, and communicating results; digital flow; anxiety in the use of ICT; digital ethics; quality of digital resources; and finally, the behavioral intention to integrate ICT. The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that influence the integration of ICT in the research process of the Higher Education teacher, and the relation between them. An online survey was used to collect data, and 1740 participants. This study used a causal model through partial least squares structural equations modeling (PLS-SEM). With this, the hypotheses established between the integration of ICT and its possible incident factors were verified. The findings revealed a significant influence path from factor integration to digital skills, ethics, flow digital, and behavior intention. Although, resource quality and ICT anxiety had significant effects on the causal model, they did not have a large impact on teachers' integration of digital resources. The total of these factors corresponded to 48.20% of the variance in the integration of the researcher of the specific digital resources to be used in the research process. These results confirm that this model is effective in explaining the technological integration of teachers to use ICT in research work.

The Influence of Cultural Snapshots on Pre-service Teachers' Attitudes Towards Death Education.

Cultural snapshots may be a didactic resource that promotes the understanding of death and provides teachers with tools that can be used to work with students. This study aims to analyse pre-service teachers' attitudes towards death education. A quantitative longitudinal panel design with pre-test and post-test measures was applied, with descriptive, inferential, and predictive approaches. The sample consisted of 161 pre-service primary teachers from a Spanish university who responded to the validated questionnaire "Death Education Attitudes Scale-Teachers" (DEAS-T). The results reveal an improvement in their attitudes towards death education after implementing cultural snapshots in class, producing significant differences between the pre-test and post-test according to gender, in favour of the male participants. The variables of death anxiety and adequate training are relevant for predicting the attitudes of both genders, in addition to the motivation variable in male participants and the variable of interest towards the topic in female participants.

Identifying predictors of digital competence of educators and their impact on online guidance.

In the current socio-health situation, new educational challenges have emerged, such as the need to implement a virtual tutorial action. Therefore, this study has three objectives: (1) to investigate the level of digital competence that early childhood and primary school teachers possess to carry out quality online tutorial actions; (2) to analyse whether there are differences in use at both education stages; and (3) to identify which variables significantly affect the development of this competence at each educational stage. For this purpose, an ex post facto design was used, based on the survey technique, by means of non-probabilistic purposive sampling. The final sample consisted of a total of 1,069 educators working at the early childhood and primary education stages, from all over Spain. The results showed acceptable digital competence, with higher scores in the primary education stage, which may be due to characteristics of the students and the education stage itself, rather than to teachers' digital competences. On the other hand, it was found that the virtual tutorial action tasks are significantly influenced in the early childhood education stage by blogs, WhatsApp, Facebook, and number of tutoring hours per month with families, while for the primary stage they are influenced by blogs, WhatsApp, Twitter, ClassDojo, Moodle, tutoring hours, number of tutoring hours per month with families, and sex. Based on these results, there is an obvious need for educational institutions to continue to develop teacher training in relation to the use of resources to carry out adequate tutoring actions and thus increase the diversification in the use of resources.

Digital competence of higher education professor according to DigCompEdu. Statistical research methods with ANOVA between fields of knowledge in different age ranges.

The tasks of the university educators must be linked to the digital demands posed by the more sophisticated professions of the twenty-first century. Faced with this panorama, the objective of this study is to examine and compare the degree of digital competence of Higher Education educators from different fields of knowledge and different age ranges according to the DigCompEdu framework. A non-probabilistic ex post facto sampling was utilized with 2180 university professors from Andalusia (Spain). The main results of the study provide evidence of an intermediate level of digital competence, for men and women. More specifically, the male professors in Architecture and Judicial & Social Sciences, younger and older than 40, possessed a higher level, as compared to the other fields. For the female professors, the highest level was found once again in Judicial and Social Sciences, in this case for both age ranges, without a clear trend found for the rest of the fields. For each dimension of the DigCompEdu instrument, the level of competence follows the same trend with respect to the overall level. More research is recommended to validate these preliminary results, as well as the development of training lines of action that are specific and adapted to each field of knowledge.

Methodological Analysis of the Effect of an Anti-Bullying Programme in Secondary Education through Communicative Competence: A Pre-Test-Post-Test Study with a Control-Experimental Group.

The promotion of communicative competence in students play a key role in schools for the purpose of improving social, emotional and coexistence relationships in Secondary Education students. The development of said competence can represent a great strategy to improve conflicts in the classroom, notably bullying. We used a quasi-experimental pre-test and post-test control group design with a sample of 55 students from the city of Salamanca (Spain) to analyse the level of conflict and their perceptions about bullying during the 2017-2018 academic year. The anti-bullying programme called the Improvement of Coexistence and Communicative Competence (ICCC) programme used is. The behaviour of students based on their level of coexistence with the group of classmates was measured by the INSEBULL instrument (Bullying Assessment Instrument), which added one more dimension of own elaboration. The results showed that, even though the significant levels of conflict, they decreased substantially once the ICCC programme was applied. Furthermore, we found differences between the control and experimental groups which underlined the effectiveness of the program. Regarding gender, no differences were found in the experimental group. This study shows that the development of communicative competence in students has a significant impact on their level of coexistence with other classmates, although the results suggested the need for longitudinal implementation of the programme in order to improve school coexistence and social skills of students from the early stages of education.