STRUCTURAL VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY OF THE SPANISH DISTANCE EDUCATION LEARNING ENVIRONMENT SURVEY (Sp-DELES)

INTRODUCTION This study examines the psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the Distance Education Learning Environment Survey (Sp-DELES) (Walker, 2005; Ferrer-Cascales et al., 2011). The Spanish DELES (Sp-DELES) assesses students' perceptions of virtual learning environments using six scales: Instructor Support, Student Interaction, Personal Relevance, Authentic Learning, Active Learning, and Autonomy. Further, the Sp-DELES includes an additional scale that considered students' Satisfaction with their classes. The original DELES has been used in 27 independent studies with strong reliability and validity. The instrument has been translated into Chinese, Turkish, and Arabic, and modified to be used in Malaysia and Palestine. METHOD For this study we sampled 265 students from the University of Alicante enrolled in various hybrid and distance education courses taught by the Department of Health Psychology. We have analyzed the Sp-DELES for validity using principal component factor analysis with varimax rotation, and analyzed reliability using Cronbach's alpha. RESULTS Factor analysis demonstrated a structure of seven first-order factors explaining 72.4% of the variance. Cronbach's alpha for each of the scales was: Student Interaction, 0.97; Satisfaction, 0.92; Personal Relevance, 0.93; Instructor Support, 0.88, Authentic Learning, 0.91; Autonomy 0.87, and Active Learning, 0.86, with 0.94 as the overall instrument reliability. The internal consistency of each of the scales reinforces the results of factor analysis, demonstrating that overall the results are consistent with those of the original English-language version of the instrument. CONCLUSION The Sp-DELES has proven to be a reliable and valid instrument for assessing psychosocial learning environments in tertiary level hybrid and distance education.