The Mobile Learning Tools Acceptance Scale: Development and Validation

This study aims to develop a scale designed to measure students’ acceptance of mobile learning tools. Research data was gathered from 407 EFL students from six universities in Turkey. An initial pool of 33 items, the first draft of the form, was created through the selection of appropriate items by the experts. The first set of questions was administered to foundation-year university students at schools of foreign languages. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted on the first data set. The established factor structure was then subjected to confirmatory factor analysis. Through the confirmatory factor analysis, the Mobile Learning Tools Acceptance Scale (MLTAS) was validated in four dimensions: perceived ease of use, contribution to foreign language learning, negative perception and voluntariness of use. Following the confirmatory factor analysis, reliability analyses were then performed on the remaining sets of items. Factor loadings were .78, .75, .74 and .76 for perceived ease of use, contribution to foreign language learning, negative perception and voluntariness of use, respectively. The total scale yielded high internal consistency reliability (α = .83) and construct validity coefficients. The findings show that the scale has strong validity and is proven to be reliable when assessing the students’ acceptance levels toward mobile learning tools.

Keywords

Mobile learning, m-learning, technology acceptance, EFL university students