INTERNATIONAL REFERENCE FRAMEWORKS FOR TEACHER TRAINING IN DIGITAL COMPETENCES: A COMPARATIVE DOCUMENTARY ANALYSIS

Abstract

The digital transformation of education has positioned teacher training in digital competences as a strategic axis of educational policy, pedagogical innovation, and professional development. In response, international organizations, ministries of education, and specialized agencies have produced frameworks, standards, guidelines, and policy documents intended to define what teachers should know and be able to do in digitally mediated educational settings.

However, the diversity of approaches, labels, scopes, and levels of operational detail makes it difficult to understand their points of convergence, divergence, and omission in comparative terms. The aim of this study was to comparatively analyze international frameworks, guidelines, and policy documents on teacher training in digital competences. A qualitative study was conducted through a comparative documentary analysis of a corpus of 40 documents published between 2007 and 2026. The corpus was organized in a documentary review matrix and examined through five categories: theoretical-conceptual foundations in ICT and LKT, teacher training pathways, pedagogical integration of ICT and LKT, AI literacy, and digital formative assessment.

The findings show that the international field of teacher digital competence is broad but heterogeneous. The dominant discourse is organized around ICT, digital competence, digital literacy, and digital transformation, while LKT appears less explicitly and is more often inferred through pedagogical interpretation.

The corpus also reveals flexible and progressive training pathways, broad but uneven models of pedagogical integration, an emerging yet still non-transversal incorporation of AI literacy, and an uneven treatment of digital formative assessment. The study concludes that international reference frameworks provide a robust foundation for teacher training in digital competences, although they require pedagogical and institutional contextualization in order to respond more effectively to contemporary teacher education needs.