Transformaciones educativas en la era digital: enfoques, capacidades y prácticas innovadoras

Abstract

The digital transformation of education has shifted the focus from technological provision toward the actual capabilities of those who inhabit the school. This project characterizes such capabilities in a public educational institution in the Colombian Caribbean through a baseline diagnostic study applied to two populations: five STEM teachers and twenty-two tenth-grade students. Two self-designed instruments were used: a comprehensive teacher assessment combining an objective test of disciplinary and pedagogical knowledge with a self-assessment of professional competencies across five dimensions, and a student questionnaire integrating academic interests, self-perceived capabilities, and a nine-item computational thinking test at basic and applied levels. Results show heterogeneous teacher performance, with strengths in technology and engineering and a critical weakness in scientific knowledge, against a uniformly high self-perception of competencies; among students, an intermediate performance in computational thinking that declines in applied programming and control-structure tasks, accompanied by very high declared interest and almost no prior experience. The cross-cutting finding is a consistent gap between perceived and demonstrated capabilities, present in both populations, which constitutes the main input for guiding relevant innovative practices. The study provides a measurable baseline, replicable instruments, and a set of guidelines for designing a subsequent phase of STEM-oriented pedagogical intervention.