In view of the ongoing digitization, the collection of digital skills is of high social and economic value both at national and international level. Focused education of the population with regard to digital skills is essential to ensure international competitiveness and the confident, safe and healthy use of digital technologies. This requires, among other things, survey instruments which, in a first step, map the current status of digital skills. The results obtained from these surveys can then be used to provide training programs for digital literacy in a targeted manner and for various application areas.
As part of a contract research project by Fit4Internet to the AIT Center for Technology Experience, instruments for recording digital skills have now been developed. The aim was to develop instruments that can be used in society at large and serve to assess the status of digital skills. "This concerns, for example, areas of competence for handling information and data or creating digital content. Within the framework of the project, we focused primarily on the questionnaire as an instrument," explains project manager Stephanie Schwarz. The multidimensional digital competence model for Austria - DigComp 2.2 AT (BMDW, 2018), which assumes six competence areas and 25 assigned competences, was used as the theoretical starting point for the development of the questionnaire instruments. In addition to a questionnaire for the self-assessment of digital competencies, a knowledge test for general job-related digital competencies was developed in cooperation with the working group composed by the BMDW and consisting of experts from educational research and industrial and organizational psychology. Within the framework of quantitative surveys with several hundred test persons from different occupational groups and sectors, the psychometric quality of the developed items was analyzed by means of statistical testing.
Based on the analyses, appropriate implications for improving the instruments were derived. As a result of the 6-month project, a self-assessment questionnaire and several modules of knowledge tasks are available to assess digital everyday skills as well as general job-related skills. These can be used by, for example, personnel developers or education providers as a basis for further developments towards the recording and certification of digital competences.
AIT-Contact: Stephanie Schwarz