Measuring academic behavioural confidence: the ABC scale revisited

The Academic Behavioural Confidence (ABC) scale has been shown to be valid and can be useful to teachers in understanding their students, enabling the design of more effective teaching sessions with large cohorts. However, some of the between-group differences have been smaller than expected, leading to the hypothesis that the ABC scale many not be unidimensional and that inherent subscales may be behaving in different ways, reducing the size of anticipated ABC effects. This study aimed to analyse the factor structure of the ABC scale. Pre-existing data sets were combined into a large composite data set (n = 865) of undergraduate student respondents to the ABC scale. Exploratory factor analyses using SPSS, and confirmatory factor analysis in AMOS, were carried out. A reduced, 17-item ABC scale can be considered as having four factors, grades, verbalising, studying and attendance. From the data sets, the discriminative power of the factor structure has been confirmed, with the results providing further criterion validity of the ABC scale.