The Role of Cyberspace in Citizenship Education of Elementary School Students: A Mixed Method Study

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of cyberspace in citizenship education of elementary school students from the perspective of education experts and to examine students' attitudes toward it, with a combined approach and a series of Sequential exploratory methods. In the qualitative part, the research method was content analysis and in the quantitative part, it was a survey method. the participants of the qualitative part included the professors of education of the university, from which 9 people were purposefully selected. the study population in the quantitative section also i elementary school students in Shiraz, 133 of whom were selected. the semi-structured interview was used to collect data in the qualitative section and the results of the qualitative section were used in the quantitative section of the researcher-made questionnaire of cyberspace and citizenship education. data analysis in the qualitative section was performed by the network analysis method and validated by the audit path construction . after analyzing the data, 38 basic themes, 8 organized themes and 4 global themes were identified. ,The quantitative section indicated that based on the variables of gender and grade, in students' attitudes toward the role of cyberspace in citizenship education,