Examining dimensions of teachers’ digital competence: A systematic review pre- and during COVID-19

Bjørn Smestad; Ove Edvard Hatlevik; Monica Johannesen; Leikny Øgrim

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e16677

. 2023 May 26;9(6):e16677. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e16677

Examining dimensions of teachers’ digital competence: A systematic review pre- and during COVID-19

Bjørn Smestad ^a,^b, Ove Edvard Hatlevik ^a,^∗, Monica Johannesen ^a, Leikny Øgrim ^a

PMCID: PMC10245064 PMID: 37292364

Abstract

The digitisation of education has heightened the importance of examining which competences are needed among teachers and student teachers. In the past decade, the opportunities and challenges related to using digital technologies in teaching and training have made the concept of ‘digital competence’ increasingly relevant. This paper examines how researchers have characterised the dimensions of teachers' digital competences both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a literature review, 116 articles were analysed to identify prevalent understandings of teachers' and student teachers' digital competence. The search was conducted in two rounds: the period up to and including 2019 and supplements from 2020 to 2021. The latter search focused on literature addressing school closures because of ‘lockdowns’. The findings indicate that research on teachers' digital competence seems unclear regarding who benefits from teachers' digital competence, the teacher's role and the links between competence and school subject domains. Moreover, teachers have a more functional role than a designer role. In addition, studies on digital competence are typically based on self-reported data, and most publications that have examined the concept of digital competence include knowledge, skills or attitudes. The COVID-19 pandemic seems to have increased the focus on the whole group of pupils and on the use of ready-made educational designs. The pandemic may also have increased researchers' reliance on self-reported data.

Keywords: Teachers' digital competence, Conceptual understanding, Teacher role, Transdisciplinary competency, COVID-19

Highlights

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The study identifies the characteristics of research on teachers' professional digital competence.
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The literature seems unclear about who benefits from teachers' digital competence.
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The literature also seems unclear about teachers' role and the role of school subjects.
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Current studies on digital competence are typically based on self-reported data.
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The lockdown seems to have increased the focus on ready-made educational designs.

1. Introduction

The digitisation of education can impact the development of teachers' digital competence and their perceptions of this area of competence [1]. The concept of digital teaching is transdisciplinary and is often described as consisting of pedagogical and methodological knowledge, content knowledge of school subjects and transdisciplinary knowledge [2,3]. Recent review articles have addressed the training of teachers' digital competence [4], the development of digital competence [5] and digital competence among university teachers [6]. However, deeper insights into how the concept of teachers' digital competence is presented in the literature is lacking. The present review looks more closely at the understanding of teachers' professional digital competence in education research. Smestad and Gillespie [7] identified the characteristics of teachers' competences in three transdisciplinary areas: (i) digital competence, (ii) competence in diversity and (iii) competence in research and development. Based on a systematic review of 380 articles, they identified six dimensions of teachers' professional competence in which there were tensions in the literature. The current paper builds on this review and further explores a particular transdisciplinary competence: teachers' professional digital competence. The original search for research papers was performed in 2019. Subsequently, we extended the review to include papers from 2020 to 2021 to determine whether school closures because of the COVID-19 pandemic influenced the understanding of the concept. Only papers that explicitly discussed home schooling and the teaching situation during such closures were included in this additional search. The dimensions described by Smestad and Gillespie [7] have been used as a framework to analyse various aspects of teachers' professional digital competence. Because the dimensions are identified in a review of studies on three different competences, they may provide novel lenses through which we can study teachers’ digital competence.

The two research questions are as follows.

RQ1: What characterises the dimensions identified in research on teachers' digital competence?
RQ2:To what extent does this characterisation also apply to the literature on teachers' digital competence in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic?

2. The concept of digital competence

This section presents relevant research on and definitions of ‘digital competence’, which is a key concept in achieving digitalised schools and societies. Several different notions, such as digital competencies [3,8], digital skills [9] and digital literacy [[10], [11], [12]], have been used to describe approximately the same concept. Many attempts have been made to define the concept [[13], [14], [15]]. According to Smestad and Gillespie [7], a typical feature of the papers describing teachers' digital competence is the use of models to define, describe, categorise and measure such competence. Examples of such models are TPACK [2], DigCompEdu [3] and PEAT [16].

The present study seeks to offer novel insights into the diverse dimensions of the conceptualisations of teachers' digital competence in academic research. In the research on this topic, these conceptualisations can wield a significant influence, even when they are not explicitly deliberated. Thus, our aim is to contribute to the discourse surrounding this issue. Furthermore, there has been a proliferation of studies focusing on teachers' digital competence in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, our study examines how the conceptualisation of teachers' digital competence may have differed during (or been altered by) the pandemic. By utilising those dimensions developed based on three distinct transdisciplinary competences, our study reveals perspectives that may be obscured when viewed solely from within the field of teachers’ digital competence.

3. Dimensions of teachers’ digital competence

Teachers' digital competence has often been described and defined in terms of practical user skills that are deemed essential for such competence [see Refs. [3,5,17]]. Self-reported data have frequently been used to measure teachers' actual digital competence [18,19]. However, the current study aims to reveal prevalent understandings of teachers' digital competence within the literature rather than identifying its contents/elements or measuring teachers’ self-reported levels of competence.

In discussing teachers’ competences within three transdisciplinary areas, Smestad and Gillespie [7] referred to six dimensions in which they identified tensions in discussions on competences.

D1: The beneficiary dimension concerns what an article addresses regarding who benefits from teachers' having a competence.
D2: The teachers' role dimension concerns which teacher roles are emphasised in the articles reviewed.
D3: The attitudes, knowledge and skills dimension concerns how studies focus on different components of competences.
D4: The sources of the competence dimension are what competences are based on.
D5: The relationship to the disciplinary content dimension relates to disciplinary subjects as the core of a competence.
D6: The assessment dimension focuses on the process of identifying and assessing teachers' competences.

Smestad and Gillespie (2020) suggested looking closer at the content of these dimensions.

4. Methods

As mentioned, Smestad and Gillespie [7] investigated conceptualisations of teachers' competences in three areas: diversity, research and development and digital competence. The Smestad and Gillespie study was a systematic review, specifically a concept synthesis [see Ref. [20]]. One result was a list of ‘six key dimensions within which there were tensions in the literature reviewed’: beneficiary; teachers' role; attitudes, knowledge and skills; sources of competence; relationship to disciplinary content; and assessment [ [7], p. 125–6]. In the current article, we have built on the part of their review discussing teachers' digital competence and supplemented the articles with newer ones related to teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. The original and new searches were almost identical, except for the period covered. However, the searches used different inclusion criteria.

4.1. Research design

The following steps can be used to describe the research design of the review [21].

Step 1: Research questions were formulated (see section 1). RQ1 addresses the dimensions identified in research on teachers' digital competence, and RQ2 addresses the literature on teachers' digital competence related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Step 2: Search words and strings were developed, and relevant databases were identified (see section 4.2). To answer RQ1, the search approach from a previous study [7] was appropriate, and this approach was used. However, to answer RQ2, an additional search had to be carried out.
Step 3: Criteria for inclusion and exclusion were developed to examine the quality and relevance of the studies from the search (see section 4.3). The quality of the studies informs decisions regarding inclusion or exclusion in the review.
Step 4: Summarising the evidence by synthesising the data. An analytical framework was adopted (see section 3), and this framework was further operationalised through reading, analysing and categorising the publications (see sections 5 and 6).
Step 5: Interpreting the findings to answer the research questions (see sections 6 and 7.2). It is also important to discuss the limitations of the study (see section 7.1) and further need for research based on our findings (see section 7.3).

4.2. Search strategies

The search was originally performed for the study documented in Smestad and Gillespie [7] and was conducted in the international databases Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), Education Source, Teacher Reference Center and Web of Science. Four Scandinavian databases, that is, Swepub, the Danish National Research Database, Norart and Idunn, were also included. We included articles published in English, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish. The search had three main elements related to teachers, competence and the digital realm. The years 2014–2019 were included in the original search, while the additional search included studies from 2020 to June 2021. The additional search included ‘COVID-19’ and ‘pandemic’ as search strings. For full details of the original search strategies, see Smestad and Gillespie [ [7], pp. 121–122 and its appendix]. Because the Danish National Research Database was discontinued in January 2021, this database was excluded from the additional search.

4.3. Inclusion and exclusion criteria

We excluded articles that did not explicitly signal in the title or abstract that they discussed teachers’ competence. Moreover, we excluded articles wherein the teachers were not mainly classroom teachers of grades 1–10 pupils (ages 6–16 years). Texts that were not articles, not written in English or a Scandinavian language were outside the defined time frames or discussed specific challenges of developing countries were also excluded. In the additional search, we included only articles mentioning the pandemic in the title or abstract.

In the original search, a team of six researchers used Rayyan software to review titles and abstracts. The researchers first reviewed the same 100 titles and abstracts. After fine-tuning the inclusion and exclusion criteria, the titles and abstracts of the remaining articles were read by only one researcher. In cases of doubt, the abstracts were read by two researchers. In the additional search, a team of four members reviewed the articles. Again, only one researcher read the title and abstract of each article, except when in doubt. In the readings of the full texts, only one reviewer read each text and consulted the others when in doubt.

4.4. Analysing and coding the articles based on the six dimensions

We analysed the selected articles based on a coding scheme developed in two phases. In this review of the teachers' digital competence, we lent ourselves to the dimensions proposed by Smestad and Gillespie [7]. We first developed an initial version of the categories of teachers’ digital competence based on the descriptions of the six dimensions in Smestad and Gillespie [7]. Then, the articles were divided among the researchers, and we discussed and developed the coding scheme after reading a few articles each. This process was repeated several times. The resulting categories function as analytic coding schemes.

The categories developed within the six dimensions are as follows.

D1: Within the beneficiary dimension, we identified categories demonstrating whether an article explicitly illustrates that an individual or group of pupils (e.g., a class) can benefit from teachers' digital competence. It could also be that society benefits from teachers' competence and that the competence includes their ability to connect to their pupils' contexts (e.g., home and family, culture or religion).
D2: The teachers' role dimension concerns which teacher role is examined in an article. For example, some studies view the teacher as a functionary in implementing a method, whereas other studies consider the teacher as designing new learning situations. Another category addresses how teachers lead colleagues in achieving changes in their schools through their work. Additionally, three dichotomous categories emerged from this dimension: (1) whether contextual factors are discussed in the analysis of teacher competence, which is illustrated as the dichotomy isolation/context; (2) whether collaboration skills are seen as part of competence, which is illustrated as the individual/teamwork dichotomy; and (3) whether it is argued that different (groups of) teachers have varying digital competences (specialist/generalist).
D3: The attitudes, knowledge and skills dimension is simply operationalised as whether an article explicitly mentions teachers' attitudes, knowledge and skills as elements of their digital competence.
D4: The sources of competence dimension illustrates the basis of teachers' competence. In the present work, we have identified categories for articles explicitly mentioning policy, theory or ethics as sources of competence. Furthermore, we identified categories based on whether evidence from research or from experience as sources of competence is explicitly mentioned along with norms. Finally, the dichotomous category global/local is used to characterise whether competence is reported to be based on global or local sources.
D5: Relationship to disciplinary content is the dimension that illustrates the ways in which teachers' digital competence is related to disciplinary subjects or has more generic forms. Competence may be related to a specific subject or mentioned as relevant to subjects without specification. We identified four categories in this dimension: (1) within subject (specific), where competence is related to a specific subject; (2) within subject (unspecific), where competence is related to a subject that is not specified in the article; (3) without subject, where no subject is mentioned; and (4) subject as a factor, where the subject is mentioned as a factor in relation to competence.
D6: The assessment dimension describes the ways in which teachers' competence is identified and assessed. Some studies have emphasised that teachers' digital competence can be assessed through self-report surveys and interviews, while others have argued that it can only be fully assessed by observing a teacher in a classroom setting. We have also identified a category based on two aspects: (1) whether teachers' digital competence is represented by simple models or (2) whether the competence is too complex to be measured by simple models and must be looked at inductively based on the teacher in question (one teacher at a time). Finally, this dimension is categorised by whether the article has a normative perspective on teachers' competence, thus describing what teachers ‘ought to know’ or whether it is more descriptive of the competence possessed by some teachers and what they ‘really do’. The final coding scheme and its operationalisations are included in Appendix A.

5. Results

We reviewed a total of 4539 titles and abstracts, among which we read 220 full-text articles and ultimately included 116 articles. The PRISMA diagram in Fig. 1 presents more details, including the numbers for the original and additional searches. For more information about PRISMA diagrams, see Moher et al. [22].

Fig. 1 — PRISMA diagram. Original search in green; additional search in purple.

Among the 116 articles, 94 and 22 articles published before and during the COVID-19 period, respectively, were included (see Table 1, Table 2, Table 3, Table 4, Table 5, Table 6). The unit of analysis is the teachers' (or student teachers') competence. The articles were read and analysed using the categories identified within the six dimensions described by Smestad and Gillespie [7]. Some categories within each dimension are not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, for each dimension, some articles were identified as explicitly mentioning two or more categories as part of the teachers' (student teachers’) competence. In Table 1, Table 2, Table 3, Table 4, Table 5, Table 6, we did not include all the categories used in the analyses. Instead, we selected only those categories whose frequency merits further discussion; that is, a substantial proportion of the articles (>15%) have addressed them.