Based on the findings of the interview study and the systematic literature review, items, and instruments to assess the digital competence of pre-service teachers were developed and validated. Additionally, the newly developed instruments were utilized to evaluate the digital competence of pre-service teachers through pre- and post-assessments (Gonscherowski & Rott, 2021) and one-time assessments of pre-service teachers at various stages of the academic process. In addition, the results obtained from the newly developed external assessments of digital competence were compared to two different TPACK self-assessments (Schmid et al., 2021; Valtonen et al., 2017).