Validity evidence of an instrument to assess the teachers’ digital competence in medical education

Abstract

Introduction: Currently, the leading role of information and communication technologies (ICT), as well as the characteristics of the new generations of students and the health challenges worldwide, require that teachers have the necessary training in digital teaching competence. The current work aims to create an instrument that measures the teachers’ digital competence in Medical Education and find its validity evidence.

Objective: Develop a tool to assess teacher’s digital competence and find its validity evidence.

Method: An initial instrument of 42 items was built and to find the validity evidence, the recommendations and steps proposed by international guidelines were followed, which include literature review, focus groups, synthesis, drafting, validation by experts, cognitive interviews and pilot test.

Results: The degree of agreement was calculated, among 10 experts, regarding the clarity, coherence and relevance of the items. Subsequently, a tree of categories was completed and the coding, grouping of testimonies by categories and subsequent analysis of the cognitive interviews continued. From the pilot test, 65 responses were obtained. Internal validity was confirmed by calculating Cronbach’s alpha, obtaining a result of 0.905. Subsequently, the exploratory factorial analysis with the principal component extraction method and the Varimax rotation method, yielded a KMO of 0.642 and a Bartlett’s sphericity test of 0.001.

Conclusions: An instrument was built that gathers sufficient validity evidence to be used to measure the teachers’ digital competence in Medical Education.