Introduction

The educational content in primary schools is constantly evolving in an effort to respond to the current needs of the modern world. Changes  are now taking place in many countries as the curricula are being revamped to be closer to the technological developments. In the Czech Republic, computer science is newly implemented as a compulsory subject from the 4th year of primary school (ISCED 1). The new curriculum includes, among other things, the principles of the Internet’s functioning. The topic of the principles of the functioning of the Internet is very important, because the knowledge of it might facilitate the teaching of Internet safety. Little is known about how prepared primary school teachers are for the new curriculum content , nor what teachers' attitudes towards the new curriculum content are. Teachers are trained for the new curriculum through development courses. In order to prepare a quality course, it is important to first identify the preconceptions of the teachers and ideally their attitudes towards the new educational content.

Project aims and research questions

Our research project has two parts. The first part aims to answer the following research questions:

1. What preconceptions novice primary school teachers have about the functioning of the Internet?
2. What attitudes towards this topic novice primary school teachers possess?

In the second part of the project, the aim is to design and realise a university course for primary school pre-service teachers on teaching the principles of the Internet. The course will be developed based on the results of the first phase and conducted using the Learning Study method. It will be transferable and scalable to non-Czech contexts.  The results of the first part and the preliminary results of the second part will be available at the ECER conference.

Conceptual and theoretical framework

It is widely accepted that people build new knowledge in the context of an old one [e.g. 5]. Children have a priori knowledge acquired out of school before formal learning begins. This knowledge is often called preconception, as we will term it in our work. This project stems from the work of A. diSessa, who posits that preconceptions are fragmented and often mutually contradictory mental representations („Knowledge in pieces”), not coherent mental models. This idea is supported by the findings of many research studies, often for example in mathematics and science [5] .

Since the principles of the Internet in Czech primary schools (and also in other countries around the world) are a new topic, we decided to investigate not only the preconceptions but also teachers' attitudes towards teaching this topic. In this project, attitude is understood as an individual's evaluative relationship to a specific reality, and also as one of the factors that can affect the quality of teaching or the quality of implementation of new topics into education  [8].

The findings on preconceptions and attitudes will be followed  up by the development of a course for of primary school pre-service teachers. It is especially important to know the preconceptions, because they may complicate formal learning [6] . The course uses the Learning Study method, which is based on the teachers' collaboration (with the facilitation of a teacher-researcher) in planning their own teaching lessons. Their lessons are realized in the course and then reflected upon, identifying the main problems and areas of risk, improving them and thereby increasing the teachers' competences.

The project focuses on novice teachers (pre-service teachers and in-service teachers with less than 3 years of practice). We focus on preconceptions of more experienced in-service teachers in a different project (not yet published).

For the first part of the project (the research on attitudes and preconceptions) semi-structured interviews were used, as is typical especially in preconception research (e.g. Babari; Brom). Participants (N = 60; 95 % female, average age 24 years) were pre-service and novice in-service primary school teachers from all over the Czech Republic and from different types of primary schools. Data were collected online (Zoom, ∼50 min). Based on our prior research and the literature [e.g. 7] , we included a number of questions in the interview, for instance, the following ones: • If we could see the whole Internet from a bird’s-eye view, how do you think it would look like? Does it have any parts? • We're talking on the Internet right now. What do you think connects our devices so that they can communicate with each other over the Internet? • Can some company find out from your online behaviour, how many pets you have at home? Interviewing was supplemented by drawing, which helped participants to express some conceptions more clearly. The interview also included questions about the participants' attitudes towards teaching the principles of the functioning of the Internet in primary school. The interviews were transcribed and analysed using a thematic [1] and frequency analyses (Atlas.ti 23.3 software). Participants signed up to participate in the research via social networks and face-to-face recruitment at the university. Participants received a reward worth of ~20 EUR for their participation. Data were collected in the spring of 2023. For the second part of the project (the Learning Study course for pre-service teachers), a combination of action research and design-based research was used. The course leader (who is also the first author of this paper) leads the course for teacher education students for six 90-min-long sessions per semester. The course will be repeated twice and improved after each realization (the first course was completed; the second course will be organized in the spring 2024). The participants of the course are pre-service primary school teachers – students of the Faculty of Education of Charles University (N=~40; 20 for each course run), who have chosen the course as elective. During the course, a combination of methods is used to identify the preconceptions, attitudes of individual participants and their progress during the course (pretest, posttest, observation, focus group).

For the first part of the project, research on preconceptions and attitudes, preliminary results are now available. Many preconceptions of novice primary school teachers have been found to be scientifically incorrect and often resemble previously identified preconceptions of children [3] and young adults [2] . A very common preconception is, for example, the necessity of satellites for data transmission. The other very common preconception is the idea of a "non-material" repository where all the content of the Internet is stored. Some teachers completely lack any conception and say that they have never thought of anything similar before. Teachers' attitudes towards teaching the principles of the Internet are rather negative. The majority of participants indicate that they consider these principles to be too complex and complicated content for primary school children. All respondents emphasize the importance of teaching internet safety, but most do not associate it with the teaching of internet principles. For the second part of the project, a course for pre-service teachers, was part of the data collected, part will be collected and analysed in spring 2024. Our working hypothesis is that it will be possible to change some incorrect preconceptions of pre-service teachers. The limitation of this part of the research is that participants attended this course by choice, so we assume that they are already at least a little interested in the topic of the Internet and computer science. More detailed results will be available and presented at the time of the ECER conference.

[1] Braun, V. & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative research in psychology 3, 2 (2006), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa 2] Brodsky, J. E., Lodhi, A. K., Powers, K. L., Blumberg, F. C., & Brooks, P. J. (2021). “It's just everywhere now”: Middle‐school and college students' mental models of the Internet. Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, 3(4), 495–511. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbe2.281 [3] Brom, C., Yaghobová, A., Drobná, A., & Urban, M. (2023). ‘The internet is in the satellites!’: A systematic review of 3–15-year-olds’ conceptions about the internet. Education and Information Technologies, 1–30. [4] Cheng, E. C., & Ling, L. M. (2013). The approach of learning study: Its origin and implications. OECD education working papers No. 9. [5] diSessa, A. (2014). A history of conceptual change research: Threads and fault lines. The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (2nd. ed.). Cambridge University Press, 88–108. [6] Duit, R., Gropengiesser, H., Kattmann, U., Komorek, M., & Parchmann, I. (2012). The model of educational reconstruction–A framework for improving teaching and learning science. In Science education research and practice in Europe. Sense Publishers, 13–37. [7] Mertala, P. (2019). Young children’s conceptions of computers, code, and the Internet. International journal of child-computer interaction, 19, 56–66. [8] Reynolds, D., Sammons, P., De Fraine, B., Van Damme, J., Townsend, T., Teddlie, C. & Stringfield, S. (2014). Educational effectiveness research (EER): a state-of-the-art review, School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 25(2), s. 197–230