Technological development in education affects kindergarten and brings several new
opportunities and challenges to early childhood education (Magen-Nagar &
Firstater, 2019). The use of digital technology is more frequent in early childhood
education as well, and there is growing attention on the successful and
effective integration of these tools in everyday practice. While research suggests
that kindergarten teachers are the most important actors in applying digital
technology in kindergartens, we know little about their digital competence.We aimed
to adapt the DigCompEdu self-assessment tool (Ghomi & Redecker, 2019)
and inspected its psychometric properties to explore its usability in kindergarten.
Our instrument contained 21 questions of the original DigCompEduSAT
modified for early childhood education, regarding 6 areas of digital competence of
educators. Overall, 242 kindergarten teachers participated from Hungarian
kindergartens selected by systematic random sampling. Reliability (Cronbach’s alpha=.894)
and construct validity (CFI=.956) of the instrument proved to be
good. Kindergarten teachers’ average score was 31.2 %p (SD=14.3 %p), they reached
higher scores on the professional engagement subscale (M=48.1 %p,
SD=20.3 %p), but they have room to improve on facilitating children’s technology use
(M=18.7 %p, SD=19.1 %p). Considering the limitations of selfassessments, this can
be a helpful instrument to survey and develop teachers' digital competence in kindergarten.
Our research also showed that parallel to
equipping kindergartens with digital technology, improving early childhood educators’
digital competence needs more attention in the future.
