Educational Digital Divide: Investigating Teachers'Digital Teaching Competence in Digital Transformation of Education

Digital teaching has become one of the key approaches in the wave of digital transformation, considering teachers are the key role in digital teaching to achieve educational equity. What is the competence of teachers to cope with digital teaching has rarely been studied, especially with regard to the gender, regional and area differences. To address this gap, this study paid attention to the differences in digital teaching competence of teachers in different gender, regions and areas. A large-scale survey was conducted and 3,732 valid responses were collected (24.2% from rural schools, 31.4% from town schools, and 44.5% from urban schools) among four major regions. The results show that the overall digital teaching competence of teachers is at an intermediate level, with the emergence of the characteristic of “transforming teaching into learning”, but the competence of student-centered learning design, implementation and evaluation needs to be strengthened. What's more, there are significant differences in digital teaching competence among teachers of different genders, regions, and fields, highlighting the digital divide in education among different groups of teachers. Thus, this study provides valuable evidence that can be used to develop flexible, appropriate, and beneficial teacher professional development programs to prepare teachers for the adoption of generative AI in future education.