Construction and validation of the remote teaching quality perception scale in the COVID-19 pandemic: an exploratory factor analysis and item response theory approach.

Abstract The biosafety protocols adopted to ensure social distancing between people during the COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic changed social interaction behavior and led educational institutions to adopt the emergency remote teaching format. To understand the impact on the learning process, this article aims to develop and build a measurement tool to measure the perception of students regarding the adequacy of remote teaching, offered by the Federal Rural University of the Amazon (UFRA), to the detriment of onsite teaching previously adopted in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this being the latent trait to be measured. For content-based validation, the study conducted three phases: 1) initial construction of the measurement tool and literature search; 2) conducting focus groups with students; and 3) analysis by judges to outline factors and potential items. The tool presented for the content validity index a mean of 94.16% of acceptance per item and values above 93.43% of acceptance for the factors and domains. For validation based on the internal structure, this study applied the concepts of item response theory, factor analysis, and dimensionality. The overall precision of the tool scores was analyzed using Cronbach’s alpha coefficient, whose value obtained was 96.64%, indicating high precision. Besides the coefficient, the precision of the tool was analyzed through the information function of the IRT test, whose result is in the interval between (-1.5 and 2.5) approximately. Finally, a standardized measurement scale was created with the metric (0,10) from 501 respondents, and it was possible to observe that a profile associated with a perceived negative loss of teaching quality is positioned at levels lower than -10 and referring to that 30.2% of students, at the levels (-5 to 5), are more likely to be positioned at a level of equivalence and refer to 45.7%, and at higher levels to 7, with 24.1% of the respondents, are associated with a positive perceived gain in teaching quality.