Background: Because of the wide use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in healthcare, medical students' knowledge and skills of modern ICT have been considered essential for their successful learning and future careers. According to Bandura's self-efficacy, enhancing ICT self-efficacy, which might be affected by technology experience, could be a pathway to improving ICT literacy and competence, which should be one focus of medical educationalists. However, there is a lack of suitable measurements of medical students' self-efficacy and a clear understanding of its relationship with technology experience.
Materials and methods: We conducted a literature review and direct consultation with an expert panel to identify potential items for the ICT self-efficacy scale. Based on the data collected in a survey of 486 first-year medical students in China, the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was employed to confirm the structure of the final version. Furthermore, we used linear regressions to quantify the association between ICT self-efficacy and technology experience measured by the age of first access to the Internet, the age at first ownership of a personal computer (PC) or a laptop, and that of a smartphone.
Results: The EFA results derived 15 items of four factors, with 67.02% of the total variance explained: Privacy and Safety, Differencing, Communication, and Learning and Application. The Cronbach's alphas for the four subscales and the overall scale ranged from 0.78 to 0.89. Regression results demonstrated a significant association of ICT self-efficacy with age at first ownership of a personal computer (PC) and the mediation role of the general self-efficacy in the ICT self-efficacy's association with the age at first ownership of a personal smartphone.
Conclusion: The ICT scale developed is a reliable and valid task-specific measure to assess ICT Self-Efficacy for medical students. In addition, enhancing students' technology experience might improve their ICT self-efficacy.
Keywords: ICT Self-efficacy; Information and communication technology (ICT); medical students; psychometric properties; scale development; technology experience.