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Measuring instructional design competencies of future professionals: construct validity of the ibstpi® standards

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Abstract

Competencies that constitute the instructional design profession and how these competencies should be measured have been of interest to researchers for many years. Among the competency sets developed to date, the ibstpi® instructional designer competencies have been widely used by researchers, practitioners, educational programs, and employers in the field of Instructional Design and Technology. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the ibstpi® instructional design competency set could be used as a self-report instrument to measure instructional design competencies. For this purpose, we assigned a five-point scale to the ibstpi® competency set and investigated the construct validity of the resulting instrument by administering it to a sample of future professionals. We used a robust method to translate the competency set into Turkish and recruited 820 junior and senior students who were enrolled in a degree program in Computer Education and Instructional Technology in Turkey. The conceptual framework of the competency set was used to develop three models to be tested via a series of Confirmatory Factor Analysis. All three models showed a good fit to the data and factors had above satisfactory internal consistency reliability and convergent validity. Although the factors in three models did not show a perfect discriminant validity, we argue that the instrument can be used to measure instructional design competencies. Discussion and implications of the findings are provided.

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Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the Scientific Research Projects Unit of Recep Tayyip Erdogan University. Project ID: SBA-2019-997.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Recep Tayyip Erdogan University, Zihni Derin Yerleşkesi-Fener Mah, 53100, Rize, Turkey

    Yasin Yalçın & Ömer Faruk Ursavaş

  2. Florida State University, 1114 W Call St, Tallahassee, FL, 32304, USA

    James D. Klein

Authors
  1. Yasin Yalçın
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  2. Ömer Faruk Ursavaş
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  3. James D. Klein
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Correspondence to Yasin Yalçın.

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Ethical approval

The study was approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee at Recep Tayyip Erdogan University. All the procedures were conducted in accordance with the ethical standards of the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants at the time of data collection.

Use of copyrighted material

Instructional Designer Standards: Competencies & Performance Statements was developed by ibstpi® (Copyright © 2013 by the International Board of Standards for Training, Performance, and Instruction (ibstpi® at http://www.ibstpi.org/). All rights reserved. Used with permission.). Opinions and conclusions are only those of the authors, not ibstpi®.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 10, 11, 12, 13.

Table 10 2012 ibstpi® instructional design competencies (ibstpi, 2020b. Instructional Designer Competencies. URL: https://ibstpi.org/instructional-design-competencies/).
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Table 11 Factors loadings for the observed variables of the essential performance statement model
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Table 12 Factors loadings for the observed variables of the advanced performance statement model
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Table 13 Factors loadings for the observed variables of the managerial performance statement model
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Yalçın, Y., Ursavaş, Ö.F. & Klein, J.D. Measuring instructional design competencies of future professionals: construct validity of the ibstpi® standards. Education Tech Research Dev 69, 1701–1727 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-021-10006-7

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