Improving elementary teachers' digital pedagogical competence through google classroom training: a one-group pretest-posttest study
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Keywords:
digital pedagogical competence, elementary school teachers, professional development, quasi-experimental design, social scienceAbstract
The digital transformation of education represents a significant social shift that requires elementary school teachers to develop strong digital pedagogical competence. As schools increasingly integrate learning management systems into instructional practice, teachers play a central role in shaping how technology influences classroom interaction and learning processes. This study aimed to examine whether Google Classroom training was associated with changes in elementary school teachers' digital pedagogical competence within the broader context of educational digital transformation. A quasi-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design was employed involving 30 teachers from a public elementary school in East Java, Indonesia. Data were collected using a validated Likert-scale questionnaire and analyzed using descriptive statistics, the Shapiro-Wilk normality test, a paired-samples t-test, and Cohen's d effect size. The results revealed a statistically significant increase in competence scores after the training (p < .001) with a very large effect size (d = 2.60), interpreted using Cohen's conventional criteria (0.20 = small, 0.50 = medium, 0.80 = large). The study suggests that structured and pedagogically grounded Google Classroom training was associated with substantial gains in teachers' self-reported digital competence. These findings provide preliminary empirical evidence that targeted professional development may support teachers' readiness for digital learning environments in elementary education; however, because the study did not include a control group, the observed changes cannot be fully attributed to the training alone.
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