Development and Validation of a Scale to Measure Academic Resilience in Mathematics

The purpose of this study is to describe the development and validation of a scale designed to measure academic resilience in mathematics (ARM). The ARM scale includes nine items and was administered to 528 7th and 8th grade students in a low-income urban school in the United States. The Many-Facet Rasch model was used to investigate the psychometric quality of the scale. Students responded to a six-category rating scale with responses ranging from 1 (= strongly disagree) to 6 (= strongly agree). The overall reliability of person separation was good (Rel = .79), and the scale exhibited good model-data fit. The data indicated that there were no statistically significant differences in student perceptions of their academic resilience by socioeconomic status (SES) or by performance levels on a statewide-standardized mathematics assessment. There were, however, statistically significant differences in student perceptions of their academic resilience by gender and teacher-assigned grades. The ARM scale is a promising addition to the array of instruments for measuring affective and motivational states of students. This study supports the inference that individual perceptions of academic resilience can be measured in a meaningful way. The ARM scale holds promise as a tool for examining academic resilience in future research.