Development and Validation of the Academic Hope Scale (AcHS) for Students

Since the majority of hope-related instruments constructed so far assessed the general concept of hope in life, developing the academic hope scale can provide valuable information in academic fields. The present study aimed at developing and validating of academic hope scale in student samples at schools and universities. This scale consisted of 27 items which extracted from the results of interviews with high school and university students and based on the theoretical foundations of Snyder’s (1994) and Pekrun’s theories (2006). The psychometric properties of this scale were examined in two studies. 241 high school students and 566 bachelor’s students are selected through the multi-stage random cluster sampling method in the first and second studies, respectively. The results of the exploratory factor analysis in the first study in which principal component analysis (PC) was used, showed that there were 4 components of academic hope, namely hope to gain opportunities, hope to gain life skills, hope in school’s usefulness, and hope to gain competency. In the second study, the results of the confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the existence of the 4 components of academic hope. The Cronbach's alpha coefficients in the first and second studies showed high levels of scale reliability. In general, the results indicated that the AcHS had appropriate reliability and validity in both school and university populations and could be used as a useful tool for measuring academic hope in various academic groups.