Bridging the Digital Divide: How Family Factors and Learning Attitudes Shape Pre-Service Preschool Teachers’ Digital Literacy

Digital inequality remains a persistent challenge in teacher education, particularly in preparing pre-service preschool teachers to engage meaningfully with digital technologies. Drawing on theories of cultural capital and parental mediation, this study investigates how family cultural capital and retrospectively reported parental mediation experiences during earlier educational stages influence pre-service preschool teachers’ digital learning attitudes, and how these attitudes subsequently shape their digital literacy. Using survey data from 1,117 pre-service preschool teachers, structural equation modeling was employed to examine both direct and indirect relationships among these variables. Research Findings: The findings reveal that family cultural capital significantly predicts parental mediation strategies and positively shapes pre-service teachers’ attitudes toward digital learning. Digital learning attitudes emerge as a key mediating mechanism, exerting a strong direct influence on digital literacy. In contrast, parental active mediation does not directly predict digital literacy, suggesting that its impact operates indirectly through the formation of favorable digital learning attitudes rather than through skill transmission alone. Practice or Policy: These results highlight the importance of addressing the digital divide from a family-informed perspective and underscore the central role of attitudes as a psychological bridge between family background and digital competence.