Development and initial validation of a questionnaire to assess the reading beliefs of undergraduate students: The Cuestionario de Creencias sobre la Lectura

Abstract

The aim of this research was to develop a new questionnaire for exploring the reading beliefs of undergraduate students, since the only currently available instrument has conceptual and methodological limitations. The paper describes the process of developing the instrument and presents a range of psychometric data obtained from a sample of 558 Spanish undergraduates who were in the first or final year of a degree programme in psychology, language and literature, or engineering. The results provide evidence of the psychometric quality of items and reveal a dual structure of two and six factors, both obtained through exploratory and/or confirmatory factor analyses. Adequate reliability based on internal consistency of the factors was also demonstrated. As a measure of criterion validity, differences in reading beliefs by gender, academic year and knowledge areas were also explored. These findings support the psychometric adequacy of this new instrument developed through an exploratory piece of research. Overall, this the process of constructing the instrument and the results from this study provides a framework for research and intervention, in addition to presenting a tooln instrument that both researchers and teaching staff could use in the context of reading and reading comprehension.