Preconceptions and attitudes of pre-service primary school teachers: towards teaching the principles of the Internet

Computing education has been newly introduced at primary schools (ISCED 1) in the Czech Republic, similarly to other countries. One of the new topics refers to the Internet and how it works. Not much is known yet about how prepared pre-service primary school teachers are for teaching this topic. The present research project aims to answer the following questions: 1) What preconceptions about the structure and functioning of the Internet students of the Teacher Education for Primary School programme possess? 2) What attitudes towards this topic these students have? For this purpose, semi-structured interviews will be conducted with primary teacher education students from all Czech faculties of education (N ∼ 80). Students’ attitudes will be assessed by a questionnaire. Results from the pilot phase of the project indicate that prospective teachers consider the topic of the Internet important, but have many misconceptions about how the Internet works.