Frameworks for Digital Competence Assessment: Proposals, Instruments and Evaluation

After a short introduction on the need for a new literacy, coming from the work of many organizations and institutions during last twenty years, the approach adopted by an Italian research group for the planning and development of a framework for digital competence assessment is discussed. This model, the first built until now, has been used to create a questionnaire experimented with High School students and has been discussed with colleagues in conferences and meetings. The criticisms and amendments which have been proposed led to a new framework, which has the main feature of being centred on the subject while focussing the analysis of the digital competence, more than adopting a discipline (IT/ICT) centred approach for its assessment, like in the first framework. In the next section of the paper the different dimensions of the framework are discussed. First the cognitive dimension is analyzed and the questionnaire developed by the organizing committee of the “Beaver” international competition to assess IT/ICT knowledge and skills in students, is proposed for the assessment of the cognitive dimension of digital competence. The discussion of the answers that two groups of students of different ages (i.e., Benjamin and Junior) gave to this questionnaire follow, and the differences in the two age groups are reported. Furthermore the answers to the questions for the assessment of the affective dimension of the framework are discussed. In the conclusion it is shown how and why the main features of the new framework can be considered to fit the required assessment of digital competence and some hints for the direction of future studies and research are given.