DEVELOPING AN UNDERSTANDING OF DIGITAL INTELLIGENCE AS A PREREQUISITE OF DIGITAL COMPETENCE

Although the interest of academics and practitioners is focused on concepts, such as digital competence, literacy, and skills, digital intelligence has its own distinct importance. Whilst the former concepts are related to knowledge and learning outcomes, digital intelligence is about the new way of thinking (particularly visible to young people) that is developing in the continuously expanding digital environment. Understanding and further investigating digital intelligence will help to establish better and more appropriate, for the demands of the digital era, frameworks of digital competence. This study proposes that measuring digital intelligence should comprise computational thinking tests, as well as tests that could be used to assess digital use and behaviour. In the context of that, a number of students at senior high schools of the Regional Unit of Thessaloniki, Greece, were tested regarding their computational thinking and their digital use and behaviour. The most interesting results are: (i) the average score of students increases as the level of education of their parents increases, and (ii) there is a statistically significant positive relationship of the students’ aggregate performance between computational thinking and digital use & behaviour, implying that they are correctly considered components of the construct of digital intelligence