Abstract:

Writing and defending a thesis is a compulsory requirement to obtain a degree. Such task involves very specific competences needed to write and defend an academic work before an examining committee. Previous findings showed that self-efficacy is positively related to academic performance. However, no existing tools register students’ perception of efficacy towards writing and defining academic texts. Our purpose was to develop and validate such a scale. The instrument was designed based on the competences students need to acquire to successfully complete their thesis. Four hundred and eighteen students (96 Master students and 320 undergraduates) from 23 Spanish Universities participated in this study by filling in an online questionnaire. Participants were contacted by email and social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp), following a snowball approach. Participants’ mean age was 21.72 years (SD = 5.73). After filling in the questionnaire, students were offered to participate in an eight-weeks long educational intervention aimed at increasing their competences to successfully complete their Bachelor or Master thesis. Participation was voluntary, and one hundred and twenty-eight students (29 Master students and 99 undergraduates) enrolled in the intervention. They were asked to complete the survey a week after the intervention finished (i.e., 128 students filled in the questionnaire twice). We checked the scale structural, convergent and, criterion-related validity as well as the scale measurement invariance across sex. Our findings showed that the scale holds an unidimensional structure. We also found that the relations between self-efficacy towards writing and defending academic texts and theoretically related constructs were in the expected directions, supporting the instrument’s convergent validity. A subset of the sample participated in an educational intervention designed to improve their writing and defending academic texts skills. For these participants, a significant increment on self-efficacy was observed, indicating that the scale was capable of tracking the effect of the intervention. In addition, the self-efficacy scores were positively related to the performance on a writing task, which supports the criterion-related validity of the scale. The scale was also found to be invariant across sex. Norms are provided to facilitate the interpretation of the scale scores. This work has been supported by University of Zaragoza (PIIDUZ_2_2 & PIIDUZ_1_167) and Universidad Pontificia de Comillas (2021-07).

Keywords:

College, self-efficacy, thesis, oral defense, validation.