Design and Validation of a Questionnaire to Assess Digital Communicative Competence in Higher Education

Abstract

This paper shows the design and validation of a questionnaire aimed at college students to assess digital communicative competence. Starting from the theoretical framework presented, we conceptualized digital communicative competence as the intersection between communicative and digital competences. To that effect, we hereby explain the analysis and validation procedure of the psychometric properties of the assessment instrument. The survey respondents consisted of 260 students were in the first semester of their degree program in Computer Engineering who were taken through for convenience technique. These responses were randomly divided into two samples (for exploratory factor analysis and for confirmatory factor analysis) to prevent unrealistic fit values. The exploratory factor analysis result shows that the model forms six factors, which are factor 1 (publication of information), factor 2 (creation and editing of digital contents), factor 3 (digital content production preferences), factor 4 (operation and search for information), factor 5 (collective intelligence through technology) and factor 6 (digital content consumption preferences). The result of the goodness of fit model shows that the instrument has met all the criteria with a value of χ2/df = 1.64, RMSEA = .078, TLI = .897, and CFI = .907. The results revealed the existence of significant psychometric features of the constructed questionnaire.