Measuring Students’ Knowledge Sharing on Social Media: A Synthetic Approach to Instrument Development

While social media is primarily associated with entertainment and social connectivity, it increasingly serves as a bridge between formal and informal learning, highlighting the growing importance of understanding students’ online knowledge sharing in higher education. The aim of this study was to develop and validate a contextualized instrument, the Students’ Knowledge Sharing Questionnaire, for the Serbian higher education context. The instrument integrates four subscales from established measures and one original subscale. A sample of 130 students from the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad, Serbia, completed the questionnaire. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted to examine the underlying structure of the instrument. The results indicated a robust three-factor structure, rather than the hypothesized five-factor model. The identified dimensions (Social Interaction, Academic Exchange, and Personal Motivation) captured key aspects of online knowledge sharing. The instrument demonstrated high internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = .888). These findings suggest that online knowledge sharing is shaped by context-specific factors, supporting the need for culturally sensitive measurement tools. The validated instrument provides a reliable basis for further research in the context of designing learning environments that purposefully integrate social media into formal educational practices and support students’ collaborative knowledge construction.