Digital literacy as a whole of digital competences: Scale development study

With the impact of digital technologies in all areas of life, especially in the economic, social and cultural fields, the importance of digital literacy has increased. Both academia, governments and various international organizations make various researches and activities to enable all society, especially students, to use digital technologies effectively in all areas of life and to adapt to digital transformation. One of the most important issues in the planning and implementations of these studies is the determination of the competences regarding the digital literacy that people should have and the measurement of digital literacy. Various problems in digital literacy scales were detected in Turkey. These problems are such as the need to update the scales, simplicity of scale items according to university students and graduates, and the application of scales to small groups, the problems between items and factors, and the fact that conceptual frameworks of digital literacy and digital competence concepts have not yet been created in the literature. All of these constitutes the problem of this study. Depending on this problem, the aim of the study is to make a conceptual discussion on the concepts of digital literacy and digital competence, and also to develop a scale that will demonstrate the digital literacy of university students and graduates. This study on digital literacy consists of three parts. In the first part, digital literacy is discussed theoretically, and the conceptual frameworks of digital literacy and digital competence are tried to be drawn by including the literature on the subject. In the second part, the process of developing the digital literacy scale is given in detail and the digital literacy scale model is proposed as a result of the pilot study applied to 451 people. In the third part of the research, Digital Literacy Scale (DOYÖ) developed in the thesis was applied to 1287 participants. The answers were analyzed and interpreted using various statistical tests such as chi-square, t-test, one-way variance analysis and correlation test. In this study, the score ranges representing the digital literacy levels of university students and graduates are presented by converting them to standardized z-scores. The competences that each level can reach are described. As the scale is reliable, valid and up-to-date, and it is applicable to large groups; it is thought to contribute to the literature.