The present study aims to develop, validate, and cross-validate an instrument measuring three proactive social informal learning activities, namely feedback seeking, help seeking and information seeking. Prior research mainly focused on detecting or measuring the frequency of these seeking behaviours and did not consider whether the information, help or feedback that has been sought was also used. Furthermore, although these seeking behaviours were studied extensively in different research fields, the current study takes a learning perspective and interprets feedback, help and information seeking as learning activities. The questionnaire was completed by a convenient sample of 650 professionals working in higher education, consultancy, retail and food production. We performed an exploratory factor analysis (N = 230 educators) to explore the structure of the questionnaire. This was followed by a confirmatory factor analysis (N = 230 educators) to confirm the structure. Finally, we cross-validated the questionnaire in a sample of business professionals (N = 190) by testing for measurement invariance. The final questionnaire resulted in a five-factor structure measuring the (1) Use of Feedback Seeking, (2) Frequency of Help and Information Seeking, (3) Use of Help seeking, (4) Use of Information Seeking and (5) Frequency of Feedback Seeking. The current study presents a preliminary, yet promising instrument that taps into proactive social informal learning.

中文翻译：

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衡量向他人学习：主动社交非正式学习问卷的开发和验证

本研究旨在开发、验证和交叉验证一种测量三种主动社会非正式学习活动的工具，即寻求反馈、寻求帮助和信息寻求。先前的研究主要集中在检测或测量这些寻求行为的频率，并没有考虑所寻求的信息、帮助或反馈是否也被使用。此外，尽管这些寻求行为在不同的研究领域得到了广泛的研究，但当前的研究采取了学习的视角，并将反馈、帮助和信息寻求解释为学习活动。该调查问卷由 650 名高等教育、咨询、零售和食品生产领域的专业人士组成。我们进行了探索性因素分析（N  = 230 名教育工作者）来探索调查问卷的结构。随后进行验证性因素分析（N  = 230 名教育工作者）以确认结构。 最后，我们通过测试测量不变性，在商业专业人员样本 ( N = 190) 中交叉验证了调查问卷。最终调查问卷形成了一个五因素结构，衡量 (1)寻求反馈的使用情况、(2)帮助和信息寻求的频率、( 3)寻求帮助的使用情况、(4)信息寻求的使用情况和(5)频率寻求反馈。目前的研究提出了一种初步但有前途的工具，可以利用主动的社会非正式学习。