Abstract

There is no discussion about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic related to the need for the development of competence to respond appropriately to virtual and digital environments. With use of several previous works related to the digital competence framework presented and actualized by the European Union in 2020, known as DIGCOMP; the main objective of the research was to learn and know about the perceptions and valuations that university students have about their own Digital Competences (DCs). On the basis of several previous works related to the DIGCOMP framework [2–8], and the online learning (OL) and an research instrument (questionnaire) was developed and after implemented with the participation of 320 engineering students from a university with different campuses in Chile during 2022 and 2023. The main goal of this paper is to present the theoretical and statistical foundations that support and show the construction and validation of a research instrument to measure DCs of engineering students. The research is quantitative (descriptive) and had the objective to know about the DCs of engineering students in the areas of (1) Information and data literacy; (2) Communication and collaboration; (3) Digital content creation; (4) Security; and (5) Problem-solving [2–8]. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.