New Publication! "Investigating the Challenges of Adapting Quantitative Scales into an Engineering Education Context" International Journal of Engineering Education

Quantitative measures are important tools in engineering education research that often lack an ongoing and robust process of validation. Researchers may take a scale from one study and use it in another because it has been published as ‘‘validated’’ without gathering evidence for its use in the new context. Validation is particularly important when attempting to develop measures of abstract constructs. The purpose of this study is to illustrate the process and challenges of adapting quantitative scales into an engineering education context by presenting a case exploring the process of adapting a scale to measure engineering epistemic constructs. The outcomes of this study provide a basis for better understanding the challenges associated with scale adaptation and validation. This work also adds to knowledge around quantitatively measuring epistemic constructs in engineering and encourages our field to critically consider its value.