Psychometric Properties of the Faculty Encouragement Scale with First-year Engineering Undergraduate Students

A Faculty Encouragement Scale (FES) was created to measure students’ perception of faculty encouragement (challenge-focused and potential-focused encouragement) in college. This paper reports the psychometric properties of scores from the FES using a sample of 237 first-year engineering undergraduat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inResearch & practice in assessment Vol. 16; no. 1; pp. 63 - 75
Main Authors Hsien-Yuan Hsu, Li, Yanfen, Acosta, Sandra
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Lynchburg Research & Practice in Assessment 01.01.2021
Virginia Assessment Group
Subjects
Academic Persistence
College Faculty
College Freshmen
College students
Correlation
Engineering Education
Measures (Individuals)
Persuasive Discourse
Psychometrics
Public Colleges
Quantitative psychology
Self Efficacy
Student Attitudes
Student teacher relationship
Suburban Schools
Teacher Student Relationship
Test Construction
University faculty
Verbal Communication
Massachusetts
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Summary:A Faculty Encouragement Scale (FES) was created to measure students’ perception of faculty encouragement (challenge-focused and potential-focused encouragement) in college. This paper reports the psychometric properties of scores from the FES using a sample of 237 first-year engineering undergraduate students in a suburban public university. Analyses were conducted in both confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) frameworks, where CFA constrains all cross-loadings to be zero, but ESEM estimates all cross-loadings. Both CFA and ESEM analyses suggested two-factor models had better goodness-of-fit than one-factor models. However, we discovered a high factor correlation in CFA model that could result from forced-zero cross-loadings. We chose the ESEM model over CFA model because the estimate of factor correlation in CFA model might be inflated. Moreover, we found one item was closely loaded on both encouragement factors. Considering a high communality of this item, we did not suggest a further revision.
ISSN:2161-4210
2161-4210