Development and Preliminary Validation of a Tool to Assess Trainee Teachers’ Perceptions and Use of Digital Sources in a Historical-Thinking Framework: A Conflict Context in Chile

Abstract

This article presents the development and preliminary validation of a questionnaire examining trainee teachers’ perceptions and use of digital sources in La Araucanía (Chile) as a source of information about the regional State–Mapuche conflict, within a framework informed by historical thinking. The instrument explores how pre-service History, Geography and Social Sciences teachers search for, evaluate and use digital information about a historical and contemporary conflict of high territorial and social relevance, including the types of sources consulted, the criteria used to judge their reliability, and the verification strategies employed. Content validity was established through expert judgement (Aiken’s V), and the resulting instrument was piloted with 28 trainee teachers, allowing an assessment of item performance, internal consistency and item-total correlations. Historical thinking provides the conceptual framework for the instrument, particularly through its emphasis on evidence, contextualisation and the critical evaluation of sources, but is not measured directly as a separate construct. The results obtained help to characterise the tensions between digital information consumption and the construction of historical knowledge in initial teacher education, and are intended to inform the design of pedagogical strategies that integrate digital literacy and the critical teaching of regional conflict in teacher training.