Development of an academic self concept for adolescents (ASCA) scale

Academic self-concept is the perception that a student has about his/her own academic abilities, constitutes one of the most relevant variables in the academic world, because of its influence on learning and cognitive functioning. Self-concept is a general assessment; nevertheless the current measurement instruments used for this construct are specific rather than general. Thus the purpose of this study was to construct and validate an academic self-concept scale with global dimensions, focused on teenager students. In its first stage, an open questions survey was designed to be applied with the intent of knowing the academic activities inside and outside the school. Afterwards, a closed questions survey was applied to a sampling consisting of 347 students ranging 14 to 18 years old from a public high school, east of México City. After obtaining the internal consistency and the items differentiation, a factorial analysis with orthogonal rotation was developed. The results grouped 16 items in 4 factors: self-regulation, general intellectual abilities, motivation and creativity. The scale shows 44.72% of a varying with a global Cronbach Alpha of .828. The present study contributes with an innovative scale with appropriate psychometric features, which globally assesses the academic self-concept.