Development and validation of digital teaching competence scale for Chinese foreign language teachers in primary and secondary schools

The digital transformation of foreign language education in China is contingent upon the digital teaching competence of primary and secondary foreign language teachers. This subject has attracted considerable attention among educational professionals. Nevertheless, there is a paucity of evaluation studies that concentrate on this particular group of educators, and an absence of a comprehensive system to assess their digital teaching abilities. This study aims to address this gap by developing a scale to evaluate the digital teaching competence of these teachers. The scale is grounded in the dimensions of "digital awareness, digital knowledge, and digital skills." Utilizing a scientific approach to scale compilation, the research first conducted a pilot test with convenient random sampling to distribute questionnaires electronically to teachers in three schools in Z province. This yielded 109 valid responses from 139 attempts. This was followed by a formal national random sampling survey, which yielded 449 valid responses out of 489. Exploratory factor analysis was performed on a sample of 217, while confirmatory factor analysis was conducted on a separate sample of 232. The scale exhibited high reliability, with an alpha coefficient of 0.974 and a KMO value of 0.953, thus proving suitable for factor analysis. The analysis identified three distinct factors: "digital awareness" "digital knowledge", and "digital skills." The latter factor accounted for 4.967% of the cumulative variance. Validation through AMOS 24.0 confirmed the model's structural validity, as evidenced by a X2/df ratio below 3, CFI, IFI, and TLI values above 0.9, RMSEA below 0.08, and RMR below 0.05. The scale has been found to generally meet the criteria for measurement standards and offers a valuable reference for the study of digital teaching competence among Chinese foreign language teachers.