The Mediating Role of Digital Literacy between Lifelong Learning Tendency and 21st Century Skills

The rapid growth of technology accompanied new requirements in all aspects of life. The constant flow of information and the irresistible rise of technology gave rise to 21st-century skills, digital literacy, and lifelong learning concepts which are all in the spotlight of several organizations, policymakers, and researchers. Due to the increasing accessibility of technology, people, each day, feel the need to adapt to this new pace of life. Thus, teachers not only should be aware of their students’ needs but also be equipped with the qualifications the current age entails. With this in mind, in this paper, the researchers studied the mediating role of digital literacy between teachers' lifelong learning tendency and their 21st-century skills. The sample consists of 273 randomly selected teachers. The researchers used three different multifactor data collection tools. In addition to the acceptable validity and reliability results, the findings indicate varying degrees of positive correlations among the factors of the data collection tools. The outputs also indicate that participants’ lifelong learning tendencies were at a low, but digital literacy and 21st-century skills were at a medium level. Moreover, while lifelong learning tendency directly affects 21st-century skills, ethics and responsibility act as a mediator between lifelong learning tendency and 21st-century skills.