Abstract:

The highly speedy development of information and communication technology (ICT) has improved the effectiveness of the teaching and learning process. There are a number of empirical studies which were conducted to explore the impacts ICT brings teachers and students in education (Bilyalova, 2017), and those studies proved that technology not only enhances teachers’ teaching skills but also supports students to become active members in the productive learning environment. In general, there are three most common ways to measure a teacher's or a student’s digital literacy including questionnaires, ways of applying ICT in the teaching and learning process, and performance assessment-based tasks (Tondeur et al., 2017). However, the most popular tools that were used by many authors are questionnaires, and those questionnaires focused on ICT application in school. What’s more, the widely-adopted assessment method in those studies is self-assessment which includes a Likert scale for each participant to evaluate his or her competency by themselves. When assessing the digital literacy level of a teacher or a student, self-efficacy belief is considered an important motivational construct because a teacher’s or a student’s self-efficacy beliefs will determine their confidence and competence to do a task. The paper aims to review the relationship between teachers' and students’ ICT self-efficacy belief and their actual ICT competency as well as the gap between the variables and factors affecting ICT self-efficacy belief. In addition, the author also reviews factors that affect ICT self-efficacy belief. The result of the study shows that there is a correlation between teachers’ and students’ self-efficacy belief and their ICT competency. While there are some authors (e.g., Aesaert et al., 2017) who claimed that participants are able to reflect their ability to use ICT accurately through ICT self-belief, others considered (e.g., Hatlevik et al., 2018) that there is a distinction between variables. Additionally, the paper also reviewed some studies investigating the factors that affect self-efficacy belief. If factors affecting self-efficacy belief are explored, it is possible to find ways to improve the accuracy of self-efficacy belief. Thus, measuring digital literacy through ICT self-belief can be reliable and there is no big gap between the variables. Future research may focus on conducting studies to investigate different ways to enhance the accuracy of self-efficacy belief.

Keywords:

ICT self-efficacy, digital literacy, literature review, belief, assessment.