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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Calculus Self-Efficacy Inventory : Its Development and Relationship with Approaches to Learning

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This study was framed within a quantitative research methodology to develop a concise measure of calculus self-efficacy with high psychometric properties. A survey research design was adopted in which 234 engineering and economics students rated their confidence in solving year-one calculus tasks on a 15-item inventory. The results of a series of exploratory factor analyses using minimum rank factor analysis for factor extraction, oblique promin rotation, and parallel analysis for retaining extracted factors revealed a one-factor solution of the model. The final 13-item inventory was unidimensional with all eigenvalues greater than 0.42, an average communality of 0.74, and a 62.55% variance of the items being accounted for by the latent factor, i.e., calculus self-efficacy. The inventory was found to be reliable with an ordinal coefficient alpha of 0.90. Using Spearman&rsquo