Construction and validation of the quality measurement scale of the virtual learning curriculum of elementary school in Iran's educational system

Virtual learning has become an integral part of today's learning. Therefore, the continuous evaluation of the quality of these learnings is one of the basic missions of the educational system, and the existence of a valid tool to measure these learning is necessary. On the other hand, in the field of virtual education curriculum, a tool that can measure all aspects of elementary education curriculum elements has not been developed. Therefore, it seems necessary to build a reliable tool. According to this, the purpose of the current research was to construct and validate the quality assessment scale of the virtual education curriculum of elementary school in Iran's educational system.

The research design was a combination in order to make a tool for measuring the quality of the virtual education curriculum of the elementary school. The participants in the content validity section were 12 experts in the field of virtual education, and in the construct validity section, there were 217 elementary teachers from Central Province, who were selected by stratified random sampling method. In the first stage, by reviewing the upstream documents, curriculum guide, articles and studies in the field of virtual education indicators were abstracted and then validity and reliability were calculated. In order to analyze the data, content validity index of Lavshe, confirmatory factor analysis and correlation coefficient of the items were used. Data analysis was done using SPSS and SMART PLS software.

  In the first stage, 51 indicators (items) were extracted in the form of 4 basic components to measure the curriculum. Then, by checking the content validity of the scale using Lavshe's validity index, 48 items in the form of 4 components of goal, content, teaching-learning strategies and evaluation of learning with validity of 0.77, 0.95, 0.94 and 0.98, respectively, were identified. In the next step, in order to check the construct validity of the desired scale, confirmatory factor analysis was used, and the results showed that except for one item (item 42), the rest of the items had a favorable factor load and after modifying the model (item 42), the t coefficients of all items in all components were higher than 1.96, which indicated the suitability of the measurement model. Also, the combined reliability for all components was greater than 0.70, which indicated the reliability of these variables or scales. The average variance extracted, which measured the convergent validity of each scale, was higher than 0.50, which indicated convergent validity. In total, the results showed the reliability and validity of the components of the virtual education curriculum scale and the tool made to measure the quality of virtual education includes 48 items and was designed in the form of four components: goal, content, teaching, learning and evaluation strategies.

Considering that virtual learning has become an integral part of formal education in Iran's educational system, this tool can be used to measure the quality of these instructions. In addition, this tool helps the administrators and policy makers of virtual learning to provide the required platforms for virtual education based on the intended curriculum.