Choice of Network: first choice 10, second choice 16

Abstract

This study explores what existing research reveals about pre-service teachers’ professional digital competence. As digital technologies increasingly shape everyday life, teaching and learning, it is essential to understand how pre-service teachers perceive and develop this competence. This review synthesises findings from 28 studies to identify current knowledge, trends and gaps related to pre-service teachers’ professional digital competence.  Preliminary findings suggest that pre-service teachers rate their technological competence higher than their digital-pedagogical competence. Although many pre-service teachers report a high level of technological competence, many remain uncertain about their readiness to teach in digitally integrated classrooms, highlighting a gap between technical skills and digital pedagogical practice.

Proposal: 

Digital competence has been highlighted both in global and national policy documents in recent decades as a vital competence for everyone in our digitalised society. Across these policy frameworks, PDC is presented as a central requirement for teachers, yet little is known about how pre-service teachers themselves understand and develop this competence. In parallel, professional digital competence (PDC) has emerged as an important topic and as separate research area and is increasingly included in teacher education as mandatory or recommended topics (Janes et al., 2023). Here the term professional implying the digital competence needed to perform within the context of a specific profession, in this case the teaching profession. In Norway, PDC was included in policy documents on teacher education from 2017 and in the Knowledge Promotion reform in 2006 through the introduction of digital skills as one of five basic skills.

While we have research on how PDC is facilitated at various teacher education institutions (Hjukse et al., 2020; Nagel, 2024) and hence know something about what the intention with both policy and curriculum has been. We have knowledge of both teacher educators', and teachers' PDC (Lindfors et al., 2021; Löfving, 2025), far less is known about pre-service teachers’ (PSTs’) understanding of PDC. 

PDC is characterised in research as complex and elusive as different concepts are being used for this specific competence (Skantz-Åberg et al., 2022). Both teacher educators and teachers express that they are unsure of what PDC entails and what their role as professionally digital competent teachers entails (Löfving, 2025; Nagel, 2024). Some research has shown that both teacher educators and in-service teachers have a somewhat technology-based and instrumentalist view of PDC (Hjukse et al., 2020; Nagel, 2024), hence it is relevant to explore whether this is something we also find reflected in PSTs.

How PSTs perceive PDC is important for several reasons. One reason is to know whether the PST’s competence and understanding will meet the objectives as addressed in policy documents on education and in the learning outcomes in teacher education. Another reason lies in the fact that it is these PSTs who will soon teach in schools and preferably ensure that students are equipped with an increasingly important competence in navigating a thoroughly digitalised world, where not only instrumental-technical competence is important, but where being both innovative and exploratory, but also critically reflective is important competences. This leads to my research question: 

What is known about pre-service teachers’ professional digital competence in teacher education?

Method The study is designed as a scoping review drawing on Arksey & O’Malley’s (2005) established methodological framework for mapping and synthesising research literature. The scoping review was guided by the research question, which directed the identification, selection and analysis of relevant literature. The search strategy was developed to capture the breadth of existing research addressing pre-service teachers and their professional digital competence. The inclusion criteria were defined in alignment with the research question and developed using the PCC framework: population, concept and context. The criteria were focused on peer-reviewed studies addressing pre-service teachers aiming at teaching grades 1–13: primary and secondary education, and their professional digital competence within teacher education programmes. The term professional digital competence is central in this review as it refers specifically to digital competence within the teaching profession. The term is widely used in academic and policy discourse, especially in later years, but as discussed, other terms like skills and literacy might be used in the literature and were included in the search, adding to the complexity. A systematic search in key educational research databases was conducted, and studies published between 2004–2025 available in English or a Scandinavian language were included. The included studies were charted and analysed thematically guided by the research question to explore how professional digital competence is conceptualised and discussed in relation to pre-service teachers in teacher education, and finally a total of 28 studies were included in this sample. A scoping review is exploratory by nature and is suitable for capturing the use of concepts and how they are understood by groups, and for exploring and summarising studies in an emerging field (Colquhoun et al., 2014), like what knowledge we have on pre-service teachers’ professional digital competence. A scoping review is well suited for discovering gaps in research literature and provide clarity about a specific topic (Davis et al., 2009).

Findings: The findings show a predominance of European and Asian studies while studies from South America and Oceania are absent in this sample. The studies included were published in 2016 (1), 2018–2021 (5) and 2022–2025 (22). As the study is in progress, findings and preliminary analyses for this paper represent tentative insights rather than definitive conclusions. One of these preliminary results hints that PSTs perceive their technological competence to be higher than their digital pedagogical competence. Several studies indicate that PSTs tend to overestimate their competencies, especially their technological competencies. This phenomenon is addressed in several studies, either by commenting the specific scores, or addressing the possibility of the students overestimating when researchers compare their findings to other studies. Besides the possibility that PSTs overestimate their technological competence, the findings may also indicate that they do not feel prepared for teaching in a digitalised school (Al-Abdullatif, 2019). Several studies illustrate that PSTs self-perception of digital competence is often misaligned with the competencies required for professional teaching. In a study by Davis & Jones (2022) students came to realize that their personal familiarity with technology did not necessarily render them professionally competent with technology. Similarly, Almås et al. (2021) found that PSTs often leaned heavily on the notion of having grown up digital and therefore assumed they were fully capable of teaching in a digitalised school. A third study by Dolezal et al. (2025) showed that PSTs with some teaching experience perceived themselves as less prepared for digital teaching than those without such experience, suggesting that PSTs exposed to real classroom demands may understand the complexity of PDC differently. This preliminary analysis suggests emerging patterns that indicate inconsistencies in how PSTs conceptualise their professional digital readiness and point to specific knowledge gaps the study will further clarify.

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