College Students with Disabilities = Etudiant(e)s de Niveau Collegial ayant des Incapacites (original) (raw)

The objective of the research reported here was to start the process of developing a measure that explores self-perceived individual and environmental correlates of successful and unsuccessful academic outcomes for Cegep (junior/community college) students with disabilities. The intent was to provide a measure for general use in all Cegep institutional evaluation activities. Here we summarize the findings related to the development of such a measure. This involved compiling and evaluating both French and English versions of the 31 item "Cegep Experiences Questionnaire." The measure uses 6-point Likert-type scaling and evaluates personal and environmental factors (both within and outside the Cegep) that students with disabilities may view as facilitating and/or hindering their academic progress. It is based on the PPH model (Processus de production du handicap). The current version of the measure is provided in the Appendix of the full report. The following activities were carried out: focus groups, analysis of open-ended questions, and psychometric analyses, including comparisons of scores of students with and without disabilities. The sample involved 138 current Cegep students and recent Cegep graduates with disabilities and 670 nondisabled Cegep students and recent graduates. Étudiant(e)s de niveau collégial ayant des incapacités College Students with Disabilities 9 9 for students with disabilities also caused difficulties. Nondisabled students noted a variety of obstacles including: difficulties with finances, holding a job, transportation problems, personal issues, high stress, and poor exam or assignment schedules. Development of the Cegep Experiences Questionnaire: Psychometric Evaluations And Hypothesis Testing Reliability. Two kinds of reliability were evaluated: temporal stability (test-retest) of single items, conceptual subscale, and total scale scores and internal consistency evaluations of subscale scores. In general, test-retest reliability for all items, subscales, and total scores was good, suggesting that scores on the Cegep Experiences Questionnaire have good temporal stability. The same is true for evaluations of the internal consistency of subscales. Relationships between Cegep Experiences Questionnaire scores and other variables. Even though validation was not part of the original scope of the present project we did conduct some preliminary validation and hypothesis testing. In general, individual items and total scale scores appear to have good validity. There are some difficulties with the validity of the conceptual subscales, however. We tried to use factor analysis to reformulate the content of the subscales. The findings on nondisabled graduates, the only sample large enough to permit this, suggest that only a minor adjustment to subscale composition is needed. We will examine the possibility of a different composition for subscales in the context of our ongoing study with larger samples.