Development of a self-efficacy scale for writing and defending academic texts

Abstract

University students often find the completion of the end of degree thesis and their Master thesis as a difficult task. Specifically, students seem to struggle when they have to write in accordance with an academic discourse (e.g., using APA style) as well as when defending their work in front of a committee. According to social learning theory, self-efficacy (i.e., one’s perception of how well s/he can conduct a specific task) is related to several aspects of students’ performance, such as the effort they will put on a task and how successful they will be in such task. In this study, we developed a tool to register students’ self-efficacy for writing academic texts and defending their work in front of a committee. The tool is formed by 8 items referring to whether the participant feels s/he can conduct a specific task. For instance: “I can synthetize and integrate ideas obtained in different scientific texts in order to support my own ideas” and “I can adequately answer questions about my work in front of a committee”. Data were collected though an online questionnaire. Participants were 480 university students from three Spanish universities and six different university degrees. Preliminary results show that students generally belief that they cannot write academic texts successfully, and that defending their work in front of a committee is a difficult task. The scale presented good current (i.e., the correlation between the scale and validated self-efficacy scales was high), and predictive validity (i.e., the scale predicted students’ performance on a writing and oral defense task), as well as high test-retest correlation. These findings support that the scale is a reliable tool to measure university students’ self-efficacy in for writing and orally defending academic texts. This scale can be used in academic contexts to check students’ self-efficacy for writing and defending academic work, in order to help students develop a stronger sense of efficacy, which, in turn, may lead to better academic results.