The Academic Performance Stages of Change Inventory (APSCI): An application of the Transtheoretical Model to academic performance

ABSTRACT

The Transtheoretical Model (TTM) conceptualizes change as a process with five identifiable stages. Each stage has psychological characteristics that are manifestations of an underlying continuum of change. Surprisingly few studies have applied the TTM to understand the process involved with academic development. The objective of this study was to assess a new instrument designed to measure the stages of change in the development of academic performance: the Academic Performance Stages of Change Inventory (APSCI). High-school students (N = 564) were sampled from the 10th, 11th, and 12th grades of a secondary school in Portugal. Results showed that a correlated five-factor structure, corresponding to the five stages of change, had good empirical fit. The latent factors of this model (stages) were shown to have the same meaning across school grade and gender. We concluded that the five APSCI subscales had reasonable internal consistency considering the small number of items per factor. Students in the later stages of change tended to have better academic performances and to be more engaged in school than those in the earlier stages, particularly the pre-contemplation stage. This study provides good preliminary evidence that the APSCI is a suitable tool for assessing stages of change of academic performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Transtheoretical Model
• stages of change
• academic performance
• psychometrics
• Academic Performance Stages of Change Inventory

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grants from the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) [Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology] (PTDC/MHCCED/2224/2014; and CIPD-BI-UID/PSI/04375/2016) and by the Fundação Minerva – Ensino, Cultura e Investigação Científica (the founding organization of the Lusíada Universities).

Notes on contributors

Paulo Moreira

Paulo Moreira, PhD, is a Professor at the Universidade Lusíada-Norte (Porto) [North Lusíada University], Porto, Portugal. He is the coordinator of the Observatory for School Improvement and School Efficacy, an organization based at the same university. He is also the coordinator of the Centro de Investigação em Psicologia para o Desenvolvimento [Psychology for Positive Development Research Center]. He is the principal investigator of several research projects granted by institutions such as Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. He is the author and co-author of several publications, including on student engagement with school.

Fátima Moreira

Fátima Moreira (MSc) is a clinical psychologist who trained at the Universidade de Lusíada - Porto, Portugal. She has a postgraduate qualification in cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy (CRIAP-Porto, Portugal) and an undergraduate degree in the area of grief and mourning from the Department of Ethics at the Université Paris-Sud, France. She currently works as a psychologist at the Psychosocial Support Service for dislocated patients at the Casa dos Açores do Norte in Porto, Portugal.

Diana Cunha

Diana Cunha is a Clinical Psychologist, PhD in Family Psychology and Family Intervention from the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Coimbra (FPCE-UC) and the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Lisbon (FP-UL). She has conducted research on systemic family therapy, pathological gambling and, more recently, on student engagement with school. She is the author and co-author of several national and international book chapters and scientific articles. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Centro de Investigação em Psicologia para o Desenvolvimento (CIPD) (Lusíada University - Porto), under a research project investigating student engagement with school, granted by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) [Portuguese Science Foundation] (PTDC / MHC-CED / 2224/2014).

Richard A. Inman

Richard A. Inman completed his Ph.D. at Cardiff University, UK, under the supervision of Prof. John Pearce, FRS.  His thesis was on the topic of associative learning: the study of how human and non-human animals learn links between events that occur close together in time and space.  Since 2017, Dr. Richard Inman has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Centro de Investigação em Psicologia para o Desenvolvimento (CIPD) in Porto, Portugal, investigating the role of personality dimensions (psychobiological model) and other individual difference variables in the positive development of adolescents.