Cross Cultural Adaptation of the ‘Comprehensive Evaluation of Use of Technology in Education’ Instrument for Use Among the Sinhala Speaking Nursing Students in Sri Lanka

Introduction: During the COVID-19 pandemic, several educational technologies were introduced in nursing schools in Sri Lanka without evaluating their effectiveness. However, there was a paucity of tools to assess nursing students’ perceptions of these technologies. Therefore, this study aimed to translate and adapt the ‘Comprehensive Evaluation of Use of Technology in Education (CEUTIE) instrument, developed in a previous study, into Sinhala culture for use among the Sinhala-speaking nursing students in Sri Lanka, with the permission of its’ developers.
Methods: Cross-cultural adaptation of the Sinhala version of the CEUTIE instrument was done, following the phases according to the model, developed in a previous study. The content validity ratio and the content validity index were calculated before the pre-testing phase. As suggested by Beaton at el. (2000), pre-testing was done at the School of Nursing, Galle, by randomly selecting 31 nursing students. During the pretesting process, 31 students, were asked to categorize each questionnaire item on a dichotomous scale as ‘clear’ or ‘unclear’. Both meanings of items and responses were explored. The distribution of responses was evaluated for a high proportion of missing items and the repetition of single responses. Thereafter psychometric properties of the translated instrument were assessed by randomly selected another 200 nursing students from the School of Nursing, Galle, from June 2023 to July 2024. Only 152 (76%) nursing students responded and those responses were used for assessing the psychometric properties of the instrument. Internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha value) and item correlations for each questionnaire item score with the total score were calculated for all responses of the respondents.
Results: Pre-final Sinhala version of the CEUTIE instrument received a maximum content validity ratio of 1.0 for all the items and a maximum content validity index for all individual items of 1.0. Cronbach's Alpha value for all 28 items in the instrument was 0.98. Correlations for each questionnaire item score with the total score were higher than the r table product moment of 0.16 (p < 0.001).
Conclusions: The cross-culturally adapted Sinhala version of the CEUTIE instrument was reliable and valid to use, for Sinhala-speaking nursing students in Sri Lanka.