Digital and Reading Competency of Secondary School Pupils and Their Comprehension of Everyday and Educational Texts
摘要
Understanding information in printed, electronic, and hybrid texts is crucial for everyday application in the labor market in the twenty-first-century evolving society. The ongoing development of digital technologies underscores the need to incorporate modern technological elements and technologies into teaching gradually. This aims to foster information thinking and digital competency among pupils and teachers, enabling them to work with various types of information in digital and traditional educational and everyday settings. The current curriculum reform in the Czech Republic emphasizes the importance of enhancing functional literacy and digital competencies of teachers and pupils across all levels of education. In 2024, a survey was conducted at the Faculty of Education of the University of Ostrava, involving 594 pupils from secondary vocational schools in three regions of the Czech Republic. The research sought to understand the impact of different types of texts on secondary school pupils’ reading comprehension, reading, and digital literacy. The research findings revealed that 70% of respondents read simple texts most frequently daily, and 60% cited the immediate availability of information as their motivation for reading electronic texts. Additionally, 55% of respondents viewed the use of modern technologies for reading as a standard routine, though not an everyday necessity. Interestingly, only 63% of respondents considered themselves literate, while 70% considered themselves digitally literate. Furthermore, the research indicated a correlation between a secondary school pupil’s perception of their reading literacy level and the time spent reading electronic and printed texts daily. The PISA research 2022 highlighted that the reading proficiency of the current Czech generation of 15-year-old pupils is stagnating, emphasizing the need for systematic digital and reading competencies education.