Professional digital competence beliefs of student teachers, pre-service teachers and teachers: Validating an instrument based on the DigCompEdu framework

ABSTRACT

This study aims to develop and validate an instrument to assess and compare professional digital competence beliefs of student teachers, pre-service teachers and teachers based on the DigCompEdu framework. We used data from N = 1386 German (prospective) teachers (73% female). First, we conducted exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and multi-group analysis to examine the factorial structure across groups. We identified seven dimensions of professional digital competence beliefs among groups. Second, we investigated mean level differences. Our findings show that pre-service teachers tended to have the highest professional digital competence beliefs, followed by teachers. The results provide a reference for the utility of the instrument to evaluate (prospective) teachers’ professional digital competence beliefs and alter teacher education and training to investigated needs. We discuss future steps for teacher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher education
• competence beliefs
• ICT
• instrument development
• validation

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge Prof. Dr. Rebecca Lazarides (University of Potsdam, Germany) for her support in conceptualising, planning and implementing the study.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. Written informed consent was. The survey was conducted anonymously and the collected data challenge any inferences to participants. The survey was conducted via SoSci Survey whose server is located in Germany and underlies German data privacy laws obtained from the participants of the study.

Notes

1. An overview of modifications within and between the competence dimensions is shown in Table 3.

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Quast

Jennifer Quast is research assistant at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Magdeburg. Her research focuses on the measurement of digital competencies in teacher education, and digital competence development in teacher education.

Charlott Rubach

Charlott Rubach holds the position of the Assistant Professor in the field of Educational Sciences with a specialisation in teacher research. She is affiliated with the Department of Education at the University of Rostock. Her research focuses on two key areas: measuring and enhancing digital competence in teacher education, and examining teaching quality, motivational beliefs, and emotions within K-12 and higher education contexts.

Raphaela Porsch

Raphaela Porsch is professor of Education with a special focus on General Didactics at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Magdeburg. Her research focuses on teacher education, school research and foreign language education. Her latest topics include out-of-field teaching, teacher shortages, school counselling and the acquisition of digital competencies in school and teacher education.