The Digital Pedagogy Competence Scale (DiPeCoS): development and validation

Abstract

Digital pedagogy is the intentional integration of technology into teaching and learning to build rich learning experiences. Given this potential and the pace of the digitization of education, it is important to define, assess and develop teachers’ digital pedagogical competence. Although there are several self-report measures that assess digital pedagogy competence, these do not include scenario-based tools. Scenario-based assessments allow the evaluation of knowledge and skills in real-world applications. We present here the Digital Pedagogy Competence Scale (DiPeCoS), a short, scenario-based tool that assesses a teacher’s digital pedagogy competence through choices made in real-world teaching and learning scenarios. An initial pool of ten items was reduced to create an eight-item scale using item response analysis, which was subsequently validated on 1,315 teachers in India. The DiPeCoS demonstrates unidimensionality, and its constituent items show acceptable levels of discrimination, difficulty and guessing parameters and reliability. Our results indicate that such a tool is valuable in assessing teachers’ digital pedagogy competence, and we hope it finds value in the field of digital pedagogical training and evaluation.