Development and Validation of a brief Digital Pedagogy Competency Scale (DiPeCoS)

Abstract

Digital pedagogy or the purposeful application of digital technology in teaching and learning, has the potential to significantly enhance learning experiences. Considering this potential and the rapid digitization in education, it has become critical to define, measure and build teacher’s digital pedagogy competence. Although there are a number of self-report tools to evaluate digital pedagogy competence, there is a paucity of scenario-based tools for the same. Scenario-based assessments allow demonstration of knowledge and skills as well as its real-world application. We present here, DiPeCoS, a short tool that assesses a teacher’s digital pedagogy competence through their decision making under teaching learning scenarios. Using an item response analysis, a pool of 10 items was reduced to an 8-item scale and validated on a sample of 1315 teachers in India. The DiPeCoSe demonstrated unidimensionality, and its constituent items showed acceptable levels of discrimination, difficulty and guessing parameters. Additionally, it also demonstrated acceptable values of reliability. We hope that this scale can be used to conduct training needs assessment amongst teachers and to assess the effectiveness of digital pedagogy training in future research.