Development of digital fluency scale: Validity and reliability study

Abstract

Digitally fluent teachers are expected to contribute to the growth of digitally fluent students. The purpose of this study is to develop a valid and reliable Digital Fluency Scale to determine the digital fluency of pre-service teachers. To create an item pool to develop a scale for digital fluency, the opinions of the focus group meeting participants were gathered by a qualitative method. After the pilot implementation of scale, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) were applied. Data were collected from undergraduate students at a state university in Turkey to conduct for EFA (n: 302) followed by CFA (n: 274). The scale structure with 3 factors and 29 items was revealed. The scale explains 54.65% of the total variance. It was concluded that the Chi-square value (χ2 = 1189.10, df = 371, p <0.001) was moderately significant when the fit indices of the model tested with CFA were examined. It is seen that the other fit values for the model are within the acceptable fit value ranges. Higher scores from the scale indicate a high level of digital fluency.