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

• Published in: Research & practice in assessment Vol. 16; no. 1; pp. 63 - 75
• Main Authors: Hsien-Yuan Hsu, Li, Yanfen, Acosta, Sandra
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• 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
• ISSN: 2161-4210

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.