Academic Challenges: Development and Validation of an Instrument

Abstract

The study was conducted to elaborate the concept of academic challenges and to develop an instrument to measure the academic challenges faced by prospective teachers. The process of instrument development started with the elucidation of the concept and phenomenon. Literature was reviewed and four factors namely Assigned tasks, Focused learning, Presentation and communication skills, and achievement results were identified related to academic challenges An instrument comprising of 18 items related to these factors was developed and administered to a randomly selected sample of 130 prospective teachers for exploratory factor analysis and to a sample of 600 prospective teachers for confirmatory factor analysis. The researchers concluded that Academic Challenges refer to the task difficulty assigned to students; they encourage students to get certain goals and polish their skills. It is important for institutions to keep measuring and updating Academic Challenges to achieve effective academic outcomes.