" Developing a Contextually Adapted Scale of Fear of Failure in Theory-to-Practice Translation among Vietnamese Engineering Students" Data
Description
Fear of failure may constrain engineering students’ engagement in practice-oriented learning, particularly when they are required to translate theoretical knowledge into practical and interdisciplinary solutions. This study aimed to develop a contextually adapted scale for identifying and quantifying psychological barriers associated with fear of failure among Vietnamese engineering students. A sequential mixed-methods design was employed, comprising content validation by 22 experts followed by a quantitative survey of 402 engineering students. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to examine the underlying structure and psychometric properties of the scale. The analysis resulted in a refined 17-item model comprising two factors: Avoidance of Conceptual Ambiguity (FA-ASD), reflecting psychological avoidance during the conceptual and ideation phase, and Assessment Anxiety (AA-ASD), reflecting anxiety associated with the execution and assessment of tangible outcomes
Files
Steps to reproduce
The analysis resulted in a refined 17-item model comprising two factors: Avoidance of Conceptual Ambiguity (FA-ASD), reflecting psychological avoidance during the conceptual and ideation phase, and Assessment Anxiety (AA-ASD), reflecting anxiety associated with the execution and assessment of tangible outcomes. Both factors demonstrated good internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of 0.859 and 0.890 and composite reliability values of 0.857 and 0.891, respectively. The final model also showed improved overall fit (CFI = 0.905; RMSEA = 0.080), although AVE values remained slightly below the conventional 0.50 threshold and the inter-factor correlation was relatively high (r = 0.854). The findings provide initial evidence for a contextually grounded measure of psychological barriers in engineering education and highlight the need for assessment practices that support experimentation, learning from failure, and theory-to-practice translation.
Institutions
- Hanoi University of Science and TechnologyHanoi, Hanoi