An Assessment Tool for Measuring Learners’ Self-Efficacy

Abstract

Self-efficacy is a psychological concept used to explain one’s belief in his or her own ability to accomplish a certain task. Four interrelated aspects are discussed to form one’s self-efficacy: mastery experience, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and emotional arousal. This concept has been adopted by a number of quantitative studies using questionnaires as a measuring tool. However, little emphasis has been given to the four aspects of self-efficacy, but overall confidence in general, making theoretical interpretation limited. This study therefore developed a 12-item questionnaire to measure self-efficacy in educational contexts, three of which represent each of the aspects. The reliability of the questionnaire was tested with 218 secondary school students, showing high Cronbach's alpha scores of 0.86 The validity of the questionnaire was tested based on the Item Objective Congruence (IOC) index, assessed by three researchers. None of the 12 items were rated lower than 0.75 in average. Finally, the usefulness of the questionnaire has been reassured by its statistical evidence reported in SCOPUS articles. Hence, we recommend other researchers interested in using self-efficacy as a framework to use this questionnaire for measuring students’ belief in their own ability to complete any given task.