Situational and Individual Determinants of Learning in Distance Education: Development of Scale

Abstract

Despite distance education is an alternative to the democratization of access to professional and academic learning, research is needed to explain its high dropout rates. This paper aimed to develop and validate an instrument that reaches learners’ characteristics, studying contextual factors and other aspects related to the course, that could affect the students’ permanence. The scale “Situational and Individual Determinants of Learning in Distance Education” was submitted to experts’ validation and after it was answered by 323 undergraduate students of a Business Administration distance course in a federal public institution of higher education. Results indicate an excellent psychometric adequacy of the instrument, with one single factor structure composed of the 25 items originally proposed that, associated to the factor loadings between 0.36 to 0.80 and a reliability index of 0.94, explained about 43% of the variability of the phenomenon of interest.