Investigating pre-service teachers’ use of social media for information about science

ABSTRACT

A survey was conducted to investigate how samples of 452 pre-service teachers from 5 Spanish universities seek information on science and technology using informal resources, particularly the Internet. Findings reveal that pre-service teachers exhibit information-seeking patterns similar to their age group in the wider population, predominantly relying on Internet and the social media as sources of information. However, due to their status as university students, they also consult a wider array of sources, including academic resources. This knowledge can inform teacher trainees in considering the use of diverse information channels and in designing didactic approaches for their pre-service teachers to enhance contextualised science learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Initial teacher training
• social media
• informal learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Compliance with ethical standards

Participants of the survey were informed of their rights under Spanish Law before it was taken. Participation was not compulsory although data gathering was done in the classrooms. Data handling comply with the Spanish legislation – Ley Orgánica 3/2018, de 5 de diciembre, de Protección de Datos Personales y Garantía de los Derechos Digitales.

Notes

1 See https://hdl.handle.net/10481/77352 for our questionnaire and for an English translation of it.

2 We use Somers's d taking the variable sex as ordinal, to check the direction of the effect; as can be seen, the Freeman’s Theta results are the same when grouping for sex. Confidence intervals are at 0.95. Freeman's Thetas were computed with the ‘rcompanion’ package in R.

Additional information

Funding

This work has been funded by the project ‘Identificación de Contextos Científicos en la Sociedad: Herramientas para Docentes y Ciudadanos, SCIxSOC’ (RTI2018-094303-A-I00) of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, Spain, the State R&D&I Program Oriented to the Challenges of the Society, and the State Plan for Scientific and Technical Research and Innovation.