Background: The increasing adoption of digital technologies in educational environments has reshaped teachers’ professional responsibilities. Digital literacy is now recognized as a key professional competency that may influence teachers’ job performance and instructional practices. Nevertheless, research examining the relationships between digital literacy, including its various dimensions, and these professional outcomes remains insufficient, particularly among secondary school teachers in developing educational contexts. Therefore, this study sought to investigate these associations.
Methods: This cross-sectional correlational study involved 98 lower secondary school teachers in Aghajari County, Khuzestan Province, Iran, between September 2024 and February 2025. Participants were recruited using a census sampling method. Data were collected using the Digital Literacy Questionnaire, the Job Performance Questionnaire, and the Teachers’ Instructional Strategies Questionnaire. Pearson correlations were used to examine associations between digital literacy and the outcome variables. Simple linear regression models were conducted for the overall digital literacy score to estimate its association with job performance and instructional strategies. Data were analyzed using SPSS version 24.
Results: Overall digital literacy was positively associated with job performance (r=0.724, p<0.001) and instructional strategies (r=0.732, p<0.001). In simple linear regression models, the overall digital literacy score accounted for 52.4% of the variance in job performance (R²=0.524; adjusted R²=0.520) and 53.6% of the variance in instructional strategies (R²=0.536; adjusted R²=0.532). All four digital literacy dimensions were also positively associated with job performance and instructional strategies (all p<0.001). The correlations with job performance were 0.50, 0.61, 0.68, and 0.57 for technical, cognitive, attitudinal, and socio-emotional literacy, respectively; corresponding correlations with instructional strategies were 0.53, 0.61, 0.67, and 0.59.
Conclusion: Higher levels of overall digital literacy and its individual dimensions were associated with better reported job performance and instructional strategies. These findings support the importance of comprehensive digital literacy development in teacher professional development, while the cross-sectional design limits causal interpretation.