Measuring Digital Citizenship Competence: Digital Skills Frameworks and the Measurement of Digital Skills

Digital technology permeates all sectors of life and requires citizens to develop the digital skills and competencies needed for successful participation in their various roles. Therefore, education should equip young citizens with the digital skills necessary to fulfill these roles. However, education authorities are challenged by the need to ensure the timeliness of digital skills education approaches and assessments of digital skills. In this paper, we adopt a broad view of digital citizenship competence and systematically review digital skills frameworks and how these frameworks are operationalized. In addition, we outline the challenges in measuring digital skills, the impact of different assessment settings, and feasible solutions for assessing digital skills in different education systems. Our systematic review of over 2,500 publications published between 2019 and 2022 finds that conceptual frameworks labeled by the terms ‘digital literacy,’ ‘digital competence,’ or ‘information and computer technology literacy’ tend to conceptualize digital skills along the domains of cognitive, socio-emotional, and technical involvement. Moreover, these frameworks often emphasize participation in all areas of life and society. In contrast, ‘media literacy’ or ‘information literacy’ frameworks stress the cognitive domain (e.g., critical thinking) and pay less attention to other aspects, such as social participation. On the other hand, most empirical studies examine digital skills in the context of post-secondary education, followed by studies in secondary schools; empirical research assessing digital skills in primary schools and the preschool context is rare. In addition, while digital competence is often conceptualized as a set of multiple literacies or skills, several empirical assessment studies indicate that performance in one digital skill area highly correlates with performance in other digital skill areas. However, tasks and tools used to measure digital skills may be non-neutral and can therefore influence the performance measured in digital skills assessments. Furthermore, appropriate scaling techniques are required to address issues that arise when using different task contexts, software applications, or ‘testlet’ designs. We conclude with recommendations for assessing digital skills and discuss challenges for their measurement (e.g., potential sources of bias) as well as recent developments in the assessment of digital skills, such as computational thinking and artificial intelligence.