Designing and psychometrics of reflection self-assessment instrument for medical sciences students

Abstract

This study was conducted in order to design and assess psychometric characteristics of a Persian questionnaire for self-evaluation of reflection in medical sciences students. This is an exploratory study conducted in 2018 in Tabriz University of medical sciences. First, an item pool was collected from both literature review (previously designed questionnaires and existent models of reflection) and experts and researchers’ perspectives. Then the primary version of the questionnaire was presented to 19 experts and 50 students to assess the face and content validity. To assess the reliability, 48 students filled the questionnaire twice with a gap of one week. To assess the construct validity exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were done. For doing so, 151 students filled the questionnaire. The data was analyzed using SPSS and AMOS. The content validity index and ratio and impact score for the questionnaire came out to be 0.91, 0.75 and 4.68 respectively. Regarding the reliability, Cronbach’s alpha was 0.75 and intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was calculated as 0.8 (with a 95 percent confidence interval). Regarding the construct validity, three factors were recognized for the questionnaire, labeled as “readiness to reflect”, “reflection in action” and “reflection on action”. It became clear that this questionnaire can predict 36.8 percent of variations in reflective behavior or process in students. Confirmatory factor analysis determined that there is a positive and significant correlation between “reflection in action” and “reflection on action” factors. But “readiness to reflect” factor has a negative correlation with the other factors and vice versa.