Resilience in virtual education: Designing and validating a scale in higher education

Abstract Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) equips learners in all settings with the knowledge, skills, attributes, and visions essential for coping with the diverse challenges they will encounter in their educational endeavors. The emergence of COVID-19 influenced different aspects of human life including education. Thanks to technology, especially ICT, Virtual Education (VE) provides the opportunity to continue education in such crises. Amidst this pandemic, many students, especially university students, encountered various challenges and impediments that resulted from VE. One of the factors which can affect VE is learners’ resilience. Therefore, it is of high importance to measure university students’ Resilience in Virtual Education (RVE) to recognize the advantages and disadvantages of this type of education and support ESD. The main purpose of this study is to design and validate a comprehensive instrument for measuring university students’ RVE. Furthermore, to confirm the validity and reliability of the instrument, its nexus with a closely related construct, i.e., second language (L2) buoyancy was explored. To measure students’ RVE, a new scale (RVE Scale), comprising 33 items, was designed. It was designed based on the operational definition of academic resilience and was adapted to accommodate the requirements of VE. It measures six aspects of learners’ resilience: emotional, motivational, cognitive, metacognitive, persistence, and sociability. To measure L2 buoyancy, a relevant scale designed by Jahedizadeh et al. (2019) was utilized. It consists of 27 items with four factors; the factors include sustainability, regularity adaptation, positive personal eligibility, and positive acceptance of academic life. A total of 412 university students participated in the present research. The results obtained via Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) substantiated the validity of the newly designed scale and all the factors and items. The results attested to the criterion-related validity of the scale.