Diseño y validación de una escala de preparatividad académica para la educación superior en Chile

Abstract

One of the major problems in tertiary education comes from its high students' dropout rates. The literature on this matter indicates that to stay and succeed in college, students must have developed, prior to enrolling, a set of transversal abilities, which we have named 'academic preparedness'. The aim of the study was to construct a measuring instrument that would help identifying and measuring the specific array of factors that affect academic preparedness. Participants were 603 volunteer students from secondary and tertiary education. After performing the necessary exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, the definitive scale resulted in 67 items, grouped in 7 factors that explained 59.6% of variance. The availability of the Academic Preparedness Scale for Higher Education (EPAES) will allow the timely assessment of preparedness and the implementation of opportune remedial actions. This will contribute to retain students and therefore, to reduce the current university dropout rates.