Developing a STEM Transfer-Self Efficacy Survey: Methods of item generation and validation

Research suggests that self-efficacy is a productive lens that can provide potential for better understanding the complicated experience [1] of transferring from two-year colleges (associate-granting institutions) to bachelor’s degree granting institutions. We have begun the development of a survey to measure community college student’s STEM Transfer Self-Efficacy (S-TSE). In this talk/poster we will present the goals and progress of this development. We discuss the critical step of developing a new survey; generating items from multiple sources. Our first step of developing items for the S-TSE survey was to adapt existing items from the Laanan-Transfer Students’ Questionnaire developed by Lanaan [2] and refined by Moser [3-4]. We then generated additional items through reflecting on the first author’s personal transfer experience. We also adapted results from qualitative work studying transfer self-efficacy [1,5] to generate additional items. We will also present preliminary data on the process of validating these items for alignment with and coverage of the construct of STEM Transfer Self-Efficacy.



Acknowledgement- This work is supported by the PROSPECT S-STEM Grant, NSF DUE-2138084, 2138058, 2138120, 2138074, 2138066. This work was also generously supported by the IMPACT STEM Transfer Network. All findings and opinions are those of the authors and not necessarily of the funding agency.