A Pilot Study of the Development of Online Learning Strategies Scale (OLSS)

This study presented a pilot development of the Online Learning Strategies Scale (OLSS) for evaluating students´ online learning strategies. In-depth interviews were used for collecting candidate items of the scale. A survey based on the pool of candidate items was then administered to 136 students and a factor analysis was used to examine its construct validity. In addition, a reliability analysis was also used to assess the reliabilities of all subscales based on the extracted factors. With good validity and reliabilities, a tentative version of the OLSS was finally constructed by 22 items which were categorized in the following seven subscales: Anxiety, Attitude, Time Management, Concentration, Self-Awareness, Study Aids and Internet Literacy. This study provided valuable information for further improvement or extension of the tentative OLSS which would be a useful evaluation tool for researchers and instructors to diagnose or further understand students´ abilities to learn on the Internet.