Development and evaluation of a questionnaire to measure student teachers' needs for digital teaching competencies in teacher education

Abstract

In order to adequately support young learners in gaining digital learning competencies and to use digital media for teaching effectively, teachers need to hold not only digital competencies themselves, but also profound digital teaching competencies. In teacher education, tailoring university actions for fostering such competencies to different target groups, however, requires identifying student teachers' individual needs. So far, there is a lack of a suitable instrument to comprehensively and reliably record the individual needs arising from perceived competence deficits. Based on a heuristic framework model of technology-related core competencies of teachers (Forschungsgruppe Lehrerbildung Digitaler Campus Bayern, 2017), this contribution describes the competence-oriented development and psychometric evaluation of a questionnaire to measure student teachers' self-assessed needs for acquiring and/or improving digital teaching competencies. Within confirmatory factor analyses we applied the "detection of misspecification"-approach (Saris, Satorra & van der Veld, 2009) to investigate the instruments' structure. Following some necessary item revisions based on a pre-study (N = 254), evaluating the revised instrument in the main study (N = 232) showed the model to comprise five dimensions for conceptualizing the need for digital teaching competencies (Planning, Development, Implementation, Evaluation, Sharing). Additionally, a bifactor-(S-1) model revealed that a general factor could not explain a substantial amount of variance, thus supporting the use of reliable subscale scores instead of a sum score. Also, first indications of convergent validity speak for a valid interpretability of the test scores. Despite the need for further research, this new instrument allows to measure student teachers' needs for digital teaching competencies in a reliable and economic way establishing its use in university as well as research contexts.