Abstract:

During Covid-19 pandemic, the importance to have digital competences is definitely clear both for teachers and for students and the DigComp 2.1 framework is the reference for identifying and assessing digital competences.

This paper presents the updated version of the self-assessment questionnaire of digital competences in school context, developed on the DigComp 2.1 framework and presented at the Edulearn 2020 conference by the authors. The version presented here is intended for use by teachers in classroom and is configured as a tool for the diagnostic assessment of students' digital competences. In fact, the results allow teachers not only to verify the perception of ability declared by the students, but also the degree of understanding of questions by the students and the real ability to assess their own competence in the different areas of the European framework. On the basis of the questionnaire, teachers will be able to plan targeted training interventions, but also to correct in an informal way during the daily teaching practice the misunderstandings detected.

In order to detect students' understanding and knowledge, compared to the 2020 version, the questionnaire developed in 2021 presents an additional section at the end of the questions formulated for the five areas of competence of the DigComp2.1 framework. This section contains the request for students to declare their practices related to the areas of digital competence.

The questionnaire in its 2021 version was validated by a group of 40 secondary school students. It should be noted that the 2020 questionnaire is divided into 5 versions, one for each school segment starting from primary school. In line with the proficiency levels defined by the DigComp 2.1 framework, the questions are customized for:
1) students of the first two classes and
2) students of the last three classes of primary school (questionnaires built on Foundation level 1),
3) students of lower secondary school (questionnaire built on Foundation level 2),
4) students of the first two classes of the upper secondary school (questionnaire built on Intermediate level 3),
5) students of the last three classes of upper secondary school (questionnaire built on Intermediate level 4).

This validation was carried out on the fifth questionnaire.

The validation was designed firstly to improve questions in the questionnaire, and to verify the validity of the integration with the section that require a specification of the competences declared.

The results confirm the validity of the additional section for carrying out a diagnostic assessment of students' digital competences: the answers relating to the students' usual knowledge and practices show gaps between the level of competence detected and the results of the self-assessment. Furthermore, the validation of the questions made it possible to identify the macro-elements on which to work to carry out a review of the questions in terms of phrasing, examples necessary to fully understand the questions, the introductory scenarios that contextualize digital practices relating to the 5 DigComp 2.1 areas.

Keywords:

DigComp 2.1, self-assessment tools, digital competences.