2014 Volume 21 Issue 1 Pages 33-43
In order to increase students’ capability responses to risks faced by high school children online, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications published Internet Literacy Assessment indicator for Students (ILAS) in 2012. It would appear that there is a third-person effect on Internet Literacy; a person need to teach Internet Literacy to high school children who are less literate than themselves. Teachers, who teach high school’s common subject “computer science”, in many cases teach other subjects and have therefore have little time to increase their own levels of literacy. Hence, to collect a fundamental material for computer science pre-service teachers’ learning of literacy within their university courses, a study from a third-person point of view was conducted so this research could gather further understanding of existing literacy levels. For achieving this purpose, two research questions were used in this study. Research Question (RQ) 1: Do computer science pre-service teachers recognize that high school children’ literacies are lower than their own levels? RQ 2: Are the pre-service teachers’ understandings of RQ1 related to a need to teach children literacy? 51computer science pre-service teachers evaluated in relation to their literacy with ILAS and this group subsequently estimated high school children’s literacy using ILAS. Results showed that the pre-service teachers’ literacies were higher than the children’s and that the pre-service teachers' desire to teach children literacy was not explained by students’ estimations for children’s levels of literacy. These results resolved RQ1 however did not fully answer RQ2. A part of this group of pre-service teachers keenly felt the need to teach children such literacies and had many suggestions in terms of the materials and methods which could be used for teaching such literacies.
