Abstract
This article describes the process of design, validation, and implementation (N = 609) of a questionnaire drawn up ad hoc to assess the digital competence of compulsory education students (ages 11 to 13) in the area of communication. The test measures students’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes in the six competences that make up the area of communication, as established in the Framework for the Development and Knowledge of Digital Competence in Europe (DigComp): interacting through new technologies, sharing of information and content, online citizen participation, collaboration through digital technologies, netiquette, and digital identity management. The purposes of the study are to design and validate an instrument to assess compulsory education students’ digital competences in the area of communication based on their knowledge, skills, and attitudes and to analyse such instrument’s psychometric characteristics with special emphasis on its reliability and validity. The method used consisted of the implementation of various psychometric validation techniques and the analysis of the results based on statistical descriptions. Items show adequate discrimination and difficulty indices. Validity was guaranteed through expert judgement and factorial analysis of the test. The conclusion stresses the pressing need for education centres to provide students with adequate educational-communicative training.
Highlights
Published: 14 June 2021Knowing what the digital competences of citizens of all ages and the extent to which they use them with awareness and appropriacy is an issue that has raised keen interest at the global level [1,2]
The results of the assessment reveal the need for students to acquire and use this type of skills, especially those related to collaborating through digital technologies, among which are being aware of the digital tools they can use to work cooperatively or being capable of correcting text documents using the track changes option
They require further training in sharing information and data, especially where it comes to knowing the media they can use to share videos, contents, data, or resources; as well as in matters revolving around citizen participation online, such as knowing how to access and use the digital services available
Summary
Knowing what the digital competences of citizens of all ages and the extent to which they use them with awareness and appropriacy is an issue that has raised keen interest at the global level [1,2]. Such interest makes no sense if citizens lack the actual adequate digital literacy [3] to cope in an ever more digital society where they should be able to use the Internet and any other digital technologies within their reach throughout their lives in an ethical, responsible, and safe way [4]. Digital literacy and digital competence are closely interrelated and mutually dependent terms, so that, as observed by various authors [5,6,7,8,9], digital literacy might be defined as the set of literacies a citizen should master to manage in twenty-first century society, bearing in mind that to be successful in this requires appropriate usage of digital competences, which are defined by the DigComp project as:
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