Developing and Validating an Instrument to Measure Students’ Perceptions of the use of ICTs and Educational Technologies in Times of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The main goals of the study were, on the one hand, to develop and validate an instrument to measure students' perceptions of the use of ICTs and educational technologies in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, and on the other hand, to know about the participants' attitudes towards the educational use of ICTs and other educational software. Some specific objectives of the research were (i) to identify the disposition of the students towards the use of ICTs, (ii) to characterize the Interaction with others through the use of ICTs, (iii) to identify the interaction of the students with LMS and ICTs, and to (iv) validate the instrument to measure students' perceptions about the use of ICTs and educational technologies, among others. An in-depth theoretical review allowed the authors of this paper to construct an instrument to measure students' perceptions about the use of ICTs and educational technologies in times of the COVID-19 pandemic. Concerning the statistical analysis, descriptive techniques were used to find out the perceptions of a group of Chilean university students about the online learning process through the use of ICTs, and then, the characteristics of the instrument itself were examined in-depth with exploratory factor analysis. Finally, in order to make the factor analysis more complex and to find proposals for improving the instruments for future research, the percentages of the variables grouped into factors were analyzed, as well as the reliability of each one of them. This research was financially supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) as part of the project “Praxispartnerschaften zwischen Hochschulen und Unternehmen in Deutschland und in Entwicklungsländern ab 2017” (Project Nr. 57334905).