Design and Validity of an Instrument to Measure Digital Literacy among Pre-service Teachers involved in Inclusive Education

Abstract

Assessing pre-service teachers’ digital literacy is challenging, particularly in inclusive education. Reliable and valid testing instruments are required to measure the digital literacy pre-service teachers possess in inclusive education. The entire research process comprises three phases. The first stage was to develop the assessment instrument, the second stage was to validate its content validity, and a pilot study was then conducted to test the reliability and construct validity of the instrument. The results of this study showed that item-level and scale-level content validity scores were both 1.0. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin is equal to 0.865. Five factors were extracted, explaining 54.40% of the total variance. The model fits were also all satisfactory. Standardized factor loadings of the instrument’ s 28 items were above 0.5. The values of Cronbach’s are higher than 0.7 for the five factors and the whole instrument. It can be summarized that the instrument had good reliability and validity and can be used to assess the digital literacy of pre-service teachers in inclusive education. There has been research into developing tools to evaluate the digital literacy of pre-service teachers. Still, few studies have addressed pre-service teachers of inclusive education, and this study fills this research gap. The subsequent phase involves evaluating it using a more extensive sample.