Establishing validity of the student personal responsibility scale.

Abstract

The present study sought to establish validity of the Student Personal Responsibility Scale (SPRS); (Singg & Ader, in press). The SPRS is a 20 question, 4-point Likert-type survey used to assess how responsible a student perceives himself or herself to be in an academic setting. The scores of the SPRS were compared with a parallel scale called the Instructors' Perceptions of Student Responsibility (IPSR) to ascertain validity. Participants were 206 undergraduate students from a medium-sized midwestern university and 10 graduate teaching assistants from the Department of Psychology and Special Education. Student participants were administered the SPRS. These same students were evaluated by the graduate teaching assistants from the Department of Psychology and Special Education using the IPSR. Pearson product moment correlation indicated that students' scores on the SPRS were positively related with instructors' evaluations of these same students on the IPSR (11 < .05). Further analyses were conducted using sex of the student as a filter variable, found a significant relation between scores of SPRS and IPSR for women only (11 <.01). These results establish the validity of the SPRS. However, the relatively low, albeit significant, correlation for the overall sample and the significant correlation for women only, suggests there are additional factors yet to be accounted for.