Evaluating Digital Literacy of Pre-service Chemistry Teachers: Multidimensional Rasch Analysis

Digital literacy is one of the essential teacher competencies in the twenty-first century. It is crucial for performing high-quality learning activities supporting science subjects, especially chemistry whereby there are many abstract concepts and limited visualization without digital tools. This study aims to validate the adapted digital literacy questionnaire and investigate pre-service chemistry teachers' ability to apply digital literacy in the learning context. The digital literacy questionnaire contains 14 items measuring digital technical, digital cognitive, and digital social-emotional aspects. Participants were 885 pre-service chemistry teachers from Kalimantan province in Indonesia selected randomly after finishing six months of the independent program for online learning. The analysis results showed that the partial credit model with the three-dimensional model has better fit parameters than the rating scale model with a three-dimensional model and unidimensional model. The differential item functioning analysis revealed no bias issues based on gender, confirming the measurement invariance statistics achieved. No significant gender differences were found based on pre-service chemistry teachers' abilities in subdimensions. Pre-service chemistry teachers performed better in the digital technical aspect than in the other aspects of digital literacy. Moreover, the pre-service chemistry teachers' competencies were categorized and discussed to offer a comprehensive evaluation.