Measuring Students' Self-Efficacy for Communication

Design students are asked to regularly communicate their ideas to a diverse audience. Students' abilities may be affected by their perceived self-efficacy, the perception of abilities to perform a task. Because self-efficacy is conceived of as context-specific, it is vital to consider self-efficacy as it specifically relates to design studios and the communication within that context, rather than to look at generalised self-efficacy for communication. To that end, this article explains the development and validation of measures of students' perceived self-efficacy for communicating in both formal (critique) and informal (studio working time) design circumstances. Using data from students at two institutions, the measures were found to be reliable; these results were further supported through their relationship to previously validated measures. The development of these measures and the results from pilot data provide insight into students' perceptions of their communication abilities that may be beneficial to educators seeking to help design students communicate competently.