Educational Challenges of Higher Education: Validation of the Information Competence Scale for Future Teachers (ICS-FT)

Abstract

The irruption of information and communication technologies has brought about an abrupt change in the demands placed on future professionals. In this sense, in recent years, information competencies have gained importance in university education from a cross-cutting perspective, which advocates as its main purpose the training of young people in information search, evaluation, processing and communication skills, especially through a digital network. Based on this idea, the present work aims to develop the Information Competence Scale for Future Teachers (ICS-FT), in order to measure the level of self-perceived skills in this area. For this purpose, a work design is presented below concerning an empirical validation, divided into different phases: the validation of content, construct and reliability, which has taken as a pilot sample a total of 259 university students studying the degree of Primary Education. The results of the validation determined the optimal conditions of content, construct and reliability that allowed the application of this scale as a generic approach to determine the level of competence in the information skills of future teachers.

Keywords

• information competencies
• digital literacy
• information literacy
• higher education
• future teachers