Evaluation of teachers’ digital literacy combining survey data and digital platform usage data

Abstract

Teachers’ digital literacy is a crucial component of educational innovation and talent cultivation in the digital age. Traditional evaluations have largely relied on self-reported evidence such as questionnaires and interviews. With the increasing use of educational digital platforms, however, behavioural trace data generated through teachers’ platform engagement provides additional opportunities to enrich the evaluation of teachers’ digital literacy. Guided by triangulation, this study proposes an exploratory integrated evaluation approach that combines questionnaire data with digital platform usage data to examine the digital literacy of 1,877 primary and secondary school teachers in a district of China. Platform behaviour data was used solely to supplement information on dimensions that could be effectively captured through platform logs. Results show that teachers’ digital literacy scores in this district were relatively low, with comparatively stronger performance in digital society responsibility and weaker performance in digital application and professional development. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses further indicate that teachers’ digital literacy shows statistically significant differences across gender, age, school type, and the age × school type interaction. These findings highlight the value of multi-source evidence integration for improving the interpretability and completeness of teacher digital literacy evaluation and provide methodological implications for data-driven evaluation in education.