The authors of this article declare no conflict of interest.
Writing and defending a thesis is a requirement to earn a university degree. Previous findings indicate that self-efficacy is related to academic performance. However, no existing tools register students’ perception of efficacy towards writing and defining academic texts. Our purpose was to develop and validate such a scale. Scale scores content, structural, convergent, and criterion-related validity as well as the measurement invariance across sex was evaluated using data from 418 students from 23 Spanish universities. Our findings showed that the scale holds a unidimensional structure that is invariant across sex. Data also supported the convergent validity, with correlations with self-efficacy and anxiety measures. The scale could track the effect of an educational intervention designed to improve students’ writing and defending academic texts skills, and the scores were related to performance on a writing task. Norms are provided to facilitate the interpretation of the scale scores.
Redactar y defender una tesina es un requisito para obtener un título universitario. La investigación previa indica que la autoeficacia está relacionada con el rendimiento académico. Sin embargo, no existen instrumentos que registren la percepción de la eficacia de los estudiantes para escribir y definir textos académicos. Nuestro objetivo fue desarrollar y validar una escala de este tipo. Se recopilaron pruebas de validez de contenido, estructural, convergente y de criterio y de invarianza de medida entre sexos, utilizando datos de 418 estudiantes de 23 universidades españolas. La escala presenta una estructura unidimensional invariante en cuanto al sexo. También se encontraron correlaciones con medidas de autoeficacia y ansiedad. La escala pudo seguir el efecto de una intervención educativa diseñada para mejorar las habilidades de escritura y defensa de textos académicos, y se encontró relación con el rendimiento en una tarea de escritura. Se proporcionan baremos para interpretar las puntuaciones.
Converging with the implementation of the Bologna process at European universities, the European Higher Education Area states that writing and defending a Bachelor’s or Master’s thesis is the last step to earning a university degree (
Writing a thesis and defending it via a public examination are two of the most complex and challenging tasks university students must complete during their studies (
Students often find a variety of difficulties throughout the process of writing and orally defending their thesis, including the correct use of writing guidelines (e.g., APA guidelines), the inclusion of relevant scientific literature in their own texts (
Different studies, most of them conducted with PhD students, have focused on exploring the factors that can contribute to explaining students’ academic performance when facing their thesis. Some of these determinants are students’ previous performance in similar tasks (
The term “writing self-efficacy” is used to refer to the level of one’s confidence to write in a particular situation (
Given the relevance of self-efficacy for academic achievement, an effort has been made to develop tools to register perception of efficacy in this context (
Instruments aimed at measuring students’ self-efficacy for public speaking (
A total of 418 students – 96 Master students and 320 undergraduates, 72% women, mean age 21.72 years (
The proposed instrument consists of eight items: five of them related to writing self-efficacy and three of them to self-efficacy in relation to the public defense of academic work. The teaching guides for the Bachelor’s and Master’s theses specify a series of competencies students must demonstrate to complete their thesis. The items were developed based on Bandura’s theory of learning and on these competencies. To test the content validity of the scale, these items were independently evaluated by a group of four educational psychology experts. They were asked to report using a five-point scale (from 1 = none to 5 = very high) whether they thought the items measured self-efficacy, as described by
The scale registers an overall perception of efficacy. We used the Spanish adaptation by
The instrument consists of 16 items registering an individual’s perception of efficacy for writing. The response format uses a sliding scale from 0 (I’m not sure I could do it) to 100 (I’m completely sure I could do it). A sample item is “I can think of a lot of original ideas”. The Spanish adaptation of the scale (
The instrument is formed by 10 items in a Likert scale response format from 1 (
The scale examines the affective, cognitive, and behavioral responses that a person may experience when speaking in public. We used the Spanish adaptation of the scale by
This instrument was designed ad hoc for this research. It consists of 8 items: 5 of them related to writing anxiety and 3 of them to public speaking anxiety. The content of each item matches that of the self-efficacy towards writing and defending academic texts scale, but referring to anxiety levels. Students were asked the extent to which they would feel anxious in a certain situation, from 1 (
This instrument evaluates the current level of anxiety a person suffers (state anxiety) and the predisposition of the person to suffer anxiety (trait anxiety). We used the Spanish short version described in
Data were collected through an online sampling. Participants were contacted by email and social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn), following a snowball approach. Respondents provided informed consent prior to accessing the questionnaire. After filling in the questionnaire, students were offered to participate in an eight-week long educational intervention aimed at increasing their competencies to successfully complete their Bachelor’s or Master’s thesis. Participation was voluntary, and 128 students (29 Master students and 99 undergraduates) enrolled in the intervention. They were asked to complete the survey a week after the intervention finished.
The educational intervention consisted of five, two hours-long sessions that combined a theoretical introduction and a practice session. Once enrolled in the program and before the sessions started, students had to autonomously work on an essay called “mini-thesis”, which consisted in writing a short essay using an academic discourse and following APA guidelines. The essays were graded by a professor. At the beginning of the first session, students received feedback about their performance on the writing task. The written task was repeated after the last session of the intervention, and the same professor graded students’ performance a second time. The professor was not involved in the intervention and was blind to the study procedure.
The teaching guide for Bachelor’s and Master’s theses specifies the competencies and skills students should show to complete their thesis, and the sessions included in the educational program were based on these competencies. Specifically, in session 1, students received feedback about their “mini-thesis” essay and learned about the different types of theses they could develop, the general thesis’s structure, and the competencies needed to successfully complete their thesis. In session 2, students learned about how to carry out a bibliographic search, how to select information, and APA guidelines. Session 3 was dedicated to learning about plagiarism and how to avoid it in their thesis. Sessions 4 and 5 were dedicated to oral communication skills (e.g., verbal and non-verbal communication, synthesis of ideas, how to provide adequate answers during a public defense).
All analyses were conducted using R. First, we assessed some statistics for item analysis. We then checked the scale structural validity through an exploratory factor analysis using the psych package (
The scale criterion-related validity was first examined by evaluating the results of participating in the educational intervention. As indicated above, 128 participants were evaluated with the different scales before (T0) and after the educational intervention (T1). In both cases, they also had to perform a writing task that was then rated on a scale of 0 to 10. Before the intervention (T0), students’ average score in the writing task was 3.19 (
We used the full sample to evaluate measurement invariance across sex and obtain the scale norms. In relation to the results of factorial invariance by sex, a marginally acceptable fit was found for the one-factor configurational model (CFI = .883, RMSEA = .102, and SRMR = .060). Factor loadings were set to be equal, and no significant loss of fit was found, (7) = 9.69,
Writing and defending a Bachelor’s or Master’s thesis is a compulsory requirement to earn a degree. Such a task involves very specific competencies needed to write and defend an academic piece of work before an examining committee. These include using writing guidelines, expressing ideas based on previous studies while not committing plagiarism, and discussing the results with an evaluating audience. One of the variables most strongly related to academic performance is self-efficacy (
Our results indicate that the scale holds a unidimensional structure, with adequate structural, convergent, and criterion-related validity evidence. The scale’s unidimensional structure was supported by the results of the factor analysis model, indicating that students’ self-efficacy in relation to their thesis involves both writing and oral skills. This is in accordance with previous studies (
The scale also showed adequate criterion-related validity. In accordance with previous studies showing a positive relation between self-efficacy and academic achievement (
On the other hand, measurement invariance across sex was supported, and mean differences were explored according to this factor. Like previous studies examining college students’ self-efficacy (
Our results support the validity and reliability of the scale scores, but some limitations of this study should be considered. First, the majority of our participants were women and, thus, the sample is not sex-balanced. This is congruent with the demographic characteristics of the university degrees and Masters that took part in the study (e.g., Psychology degree). Also, even though more than 20 universities participated in the study, a large portion of students came from one university. An effort should be made in future studies to collect data with students from a more diverse sample. Second, our study includes longitudinal data, which allowed us to examine the effect of an educational program on students’ self-efficacy and verify that by intervening on the contents evaluated in the scale, the scores after the intervention were significantly higher. However, it should be noted that even though we found increases in students’ self-efficacy and performance on the writing task from T0 to T1, we did not include a control group. Thus, we cannot rule out alternative explanations of the results. Despite this, students who participated in the intervention were enrolled in different degrees and Masters, which hinders the possibility of a common factor influencing their perception of efficacy and writing scores. Third, we did not include a measure of students’ performance in an oral examination task. As a pilot, for a very small subset of the students (13 out of 128) in the intervention group, the scores obtained in an oral defense task were assessed before and after the intervention. The mean score on the oral task was statistically higher after the intervention (7.31 vs. 8.69,
To conclude, our findings support that the scale is a reliable and valid tool to measure university students’ self-efficacy for writing and defending academic texts. We believe the scale is useful to guide educational interventions aimed at increasing students’ self-efficacy towards this specific task. Providing students with strategies that build their confidence in writing and defending academic texts will most likely boost their self-efficacy. Our findings and those of previous studies show that the higher the self-efficacy towards a specific task, the lower the anxiety levels, and the better the academic results. Hence, the assessment and promotion of self-efficacy towards writing and defending academic texts will not only increase the likelihood of students completing their thesis but also have a positive impact on their wellbeing. The latter line of work is crucial if the data on mental health in university students are considered (
Cite this article as: Collado, S., Fidalgo, C., Rodríguez-Rey, R., & Sorrel, M. A. (2022). Development and validation of the self-efficacy for writing and defending academic texts scale.
Funding: This study has been supported by four educational innovation projects (PIIDUZ_17_047; PIIDUZ_18_097, & PIIDUZ_19_052, coordinated by the first author and PIIDUZ_18_123, coordinated by the second author. All of them funded by competitive calls at Universidad de Zaragoza.
The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Open Science Framework repository at