Adaptation and Validation of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Competence Scale in Hong Kong

Information and communication technology (ICT) is unavoidable in education. However, it is found that the actual adoption of ICT in the classroom is limited (Hsu, 2017; Hu & Yelland, 2017; Rubach &Lazarides, 2021; Szeto &Cheng, 2014; Tondeur et al., 2017). Hence, to facilitate the actual adaptation of ICT in the classroom, there were an increasing number of studies focusing on the teachers’ ICT competencies (Hsu, 2017; Rubach &Lazarides, 2021; Tondeur et al., 2017) and how ICT can be integrated and incorporated into curricula (Hu &Yelland, 2017; Szeto &Cheng, 2014; Hu &Yelland, 2017). Likewise, in Hong Kong, despite the ongoing support and grants for ICT development from the Education Bureau (Education Bureau, 2022), teachers’ adaptation to ICT is challenging. Whether teachers can make good use of ICT is not just a matter of hardware and training availability but also a matter of individual teachers’ preference, their ICT competence, their experience with using ICT for pedagogical purposes, support from schools, etc. (Bai & Chai,2021; Hu& Yelland, 2017; Rubach & Lazarides, 2021). For this, this paper aims to explore and discuss kindergarten teachers' ICT competence and identify improvement areas. This paper is significant because the result directs kindergarten’s initial teacher training (ITT) courses.

Two hundred forty-three kindergarten teachers in ITT completed a 32-item survey measuring ICT competence beliefs in six areas: Information and data literacy, Communication and collaboration, Digital content creation, Safety and security, Problem-solving, and Analyzing and reflecting (Rubach & Lazarides, 2021). Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was used to analyze the underlying factorial structures of the items related to teachers’ ICT competence in ITT in Hong Kong. In addition, the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure, Bartlett's Test of Sphericity, and reliability coefficient were reported. The result shows high-scale reliability with Crobach’s Alpha of 0.944. However, the EFA generates a five-factor solution with a similar but slightly different factorial structure of ICT competence beliefs with the six areas in the original instrument, suggesting that Hong Kong teachers in ITT perceived ICT competence differently in some areas. The five factors extracted include three factors that are related to basic usage: Information and data literacy (search), information and data literacy (Storing and organizing), and communication, collaboration, and safety. And two factors related to higher-order thinking: create, anlysis, and evaluate, and opportunities and risks. On the other hand, descriptive statistics and results of ANOVA under different demographic groups were reported further to discuss teachers' ICT competence in Hong Kong. The result shows that teachers are doing better in basic usage than in tasks related to higher-order thinking. Suggestions for the ITT course were discussed.