A study of factors influencing digital ethical literacy among elementary and secondary pre-service teachers: a structural equation modeling analysis

With the application and development of generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT in the field of education and teaching, higher requirements have been put forward to improve the digital ethical literacy of pre-service teachers.However, there are still impediments to the current development of digital ethical literacy among pre-service teachers.Therefore, based on the social cognitive theory, this study aims to discuss the individual-level, behavioral-level, environmental-level, and social-level factors and their relationships that affect pre-service teachers' digital ethics literacy.A total of 524 preservice teachers in China were used as the study population.The study found that the factors influencing pre-service teachers' digital ethics literacy include seven dimensions: personal values and digital ethics awareness at the individual level, digital ethics education competence and digital technology use skills at the behavioral level, resources and environment of the school and related educational policies at the environmental level, and social recognition at the social level.Among them, there are some interactions between the individual and behavioral dimensions, the environment and individual dimensions, the environment and behavioral dimensions, the individual, behavioral and environmental dimensions, and the social and individual behavioral dimensions two by two, and they play a positive influence on improving the digital ethical literacy of the pre-service teachers, but the interactions between the social and environmental dimensions are not significant.On this basis, the improvement of digital ethical literacy of pre-service teachers is discussed to provide some references for the related research on improving digital ethical literacy of pre-service teachers.