Academic repercussions of virtual education on Latin American students: Validation of a scale

Introduction: The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic has forced students to be able to adapt to new means of education. The closure of educational centers has generated a massive migration to virtuality and, often, neither the institutions nor the students were prepared for this modality. Objective: To validate a scale that measures the academic repercussions as a consequence of the measures taken by the pandemic among university students in 13 countries of Latin America. Methodology: Instrumental, analytical and cross-sectional study. The sampling was non-probabilistic and by convenience. Evaluations of form and substance were carried out. The substantive evaluation was carried out by expert judgment, and a small pilot was conducted to evaluate the form of the items. Results: In the substantive analysis, item 1 was the most relevant (V = 0.93; 95% CI: 0.82-0.98), as was the case for representativeness and clarity. Furthermore, the preliminary analysis of the items shows that item 6 has the highest mean score (M = 2.67) and item 1 the lowest (M = 2.19). Regarding variability, item 4 (SD = 1.40) shows the greatest dispersion. The relevance of the exploratory factor analysis is justified by the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin coefficient (0.854) and Bartlett's test (17716.5; gl = 15; p = 0.000) being acceptable and significant. Conclusions: The REP-ACAD-COVID-19-LAT scale is a valid and reliable scale to measure the impact of virtuality in times of health emergency such as the COVID-19 pandemic.