Measurement of Student Self Efficacy in Marketing Courses (MARKESE)

Abstract

This paper reports on a preliminary validity and reliability analysis of an instrument used to measure students’ academic self-efficacy, or their perceived confidence in their ability to perform specific academic tasks. The survey was administered before and after (T1 and T2) their respective marketing courses (n=58). The main scale was developed to be specifically relevant to the context of marketing education (which is consistent with self-efficacy theory) and included five dimensions such as “applying theory to practice” and “written expression skills”. A principal components factor analysis on each of the five dimensions yielded single factor solutions, explaining greater than 60% of the variance in all cases. The items in each subscale showed reasonable extraction, indicating strong convergent validity, although suggesting the slight rewording of two items. Chronbach alpha scores were consistently above 0.7, with a few exceptions, serving as a reasonable reliability check. The five subscales (composite variables) showed positive and significant correlations (>0.5 p<0.001) from the “before” survey to the “after”: an encouraging indicator of test-retest reliability. A within-survey analysis showed some stronger correlations (>0.6), especially between the subscales of “Practical Self Efficacy” and “Applying Theory to Practice”. On the other hand, less strong correlations (<0.5) were found between other – less related – subscales, such as “Applying Theory to Practice” and “Research Self Efficacy”, or “Practical Self Efficacy and “Verbal, Communication and Interpersonal Self Efficacy”. This suggests some discriminant validity between the constructs; however strong divergences might not be expected since the overarching concept is student selfefficacy. Further work is required. The MARKESE scale is potentially a useful psychometric which might be used as a predictor variable for satisfaction, retention, employment outcomes, future study success or to identify “at risk” students.