resilience in virtual education: towards designing and validating a scale in higher education

The emergence of covid-19 has influenced different aspects of human life including education. thanks to technology especially ict, virtual education has provided the opportunity to continue education. one of the factors which can be affected by virtual education is leaners’ resilience. therefore, it is of high importance to measure learners’ resilience in virtual education so as to recognize the advantages and disadvantages of this type of education and enhance its effectiveness. the main purpose of this study is to design and validate a comprehensive instrument for measuring efl university students’ resilience in virtual education (rve). furthermore, to confirm the validity and reliability of the instrument, its association with a closely-related construct, i.e., l2 buoyancy was explored.method: to do so, a new scale (rve), comprising of 33 items, was designed. it measures six aspects of learners’ resilience, including, emotion, motivation, cognition, metacognition, persistence, and sociability. to assess second language (l2) buoyancy, a relevant scale consisting of 27 items with four factors was utilized; the factors include: sustainability, regularity adaptation, positive personal eligibility and positive acceptance of academic life. a total of 412 students participated in the present research. the results estimated via cfa substantiated the validity of the newly designed scale and all the factors and items. to further validate the scale, its association with a relevant variable, which is l2 buoyancy, was investigated via sem. the results attested to the criterion-related validity of the scale. the findings obtained from the scale can help teachers, university administrators, lectures, authorities, educational planners and policy makers, material developers and text book writers, to identify the ups and downs of virtual education, the level of students’ resilience in encountering virtual education, and its efficiency.