Can overclaiming technique improve self-assessment tools for digital competence? The case of DigCompSat

Abstract

Digital competence is crucial for living, working and participating in current societies. Despite its huge importance, objective measurement tools for it are scarce due to its developmental difficulty. Self-assessment of digital competence seems a promising proxy of objective tests, and it additionally offers the possibility for surveying otherwise unmeasurable constructs such as attitudes and beliefs. However, self-assessment tools are burdened with validity problems, most notably response biases such as overly positive descriptions, overclaiming or careless and insufficient effort responding. In this paper, we investigate how these problems can be mitigated by using the overclaiming technique, a technique that identifies and corrects the bias variance in self-assessments. Our main result was that the use of the overclaiming technique can lead to higher reliability and validity of digital competence self-assessment tools, especially for short scales. Moreover, it allows for correcting additional spurious variance in comparison with careless responding indexes, which allows the use of both these techniques in parallel to increase the quality of data. Our results are important in providing advances in enhanced information on digital competence that can result in better lifelong learning decisions when used at the individual level and in better policy-making decisions when used at the aggregate level.