Digital literacy is associated with digital teaching self-efficacy among pre-service physical education teachers: the indirect roles of professional identity and teaching self-efficacy

Background: The digital transformation of education poses new demands on physical education (PE) teachers' professional competencies. Pre-service PE teachers, as the future workforce, may have their digital teaching self-efficacy associated with digital literacy through indirect pathways. Methods: Using convenience cluster sampling, 776 pre-service PE teachers from first- to fourth-year undergraduate PE programmes in five normal universities in Hubei Province, China, were surveyed online. Participants completed measures of digital literacy, professional identity, teaching self-efficacy, and Digital Teaching Self-Efficacy. SPSS 26.0 and AMOS 31.0 were used for descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, common method bias testing, and confirmatory factor analysis. PROCESS macro (Model 6) with 5,000 bootstrap samples was employed to test the serial indirect pathway model. Results: < 0.001). The unstandardized indirect effects via professional identity and teaching self-efficacy were 0.0651 and 0.0703, respectively. The serial indirect pathway was significant, with an unstandardized effect of 0.0282, 95% CI [0.0180, 0.0409]. Conclusion: This study explored the link between digital literacy and Digital Teaching Self-Efficacy among pre-service physical education teachers. The results are consistent with the model in which digital literacy is associated with digital teaching self-efficacy directly, and indirectly through professional identity, teaching self-efficacy, and their serial indirect pathway. These findings are consistent with the proposed indirect pathway linking digital literacy to higher Digital Teaching Self-Efficacy. These findings may help generate intervention hypotheses related to strengthening professional identity and providing guided digital teaching experiences. Such hypotheses should be tested through longitudinal studies or experimental designs before being translated into practice. Overall, this study offers empirical insights that may inform PE teacher preparation by integrating digital training with identity-building and self-efficacy development. Due to the cross-sectional design, all findings should be interpreted as correlational, not causal.