The Academic Rational Beliefs Scale: Development, Validation, and Implications for College Counselors

This study reports on a new instrument, the Academic Rational Beliefs Scale, designed to measure college students' academic beliefs along a rational-irrational continuum. The new instrument is potentially useful when working with students experiencing academic difficulties. Information about test construction, reliability, validity, and generalizability are presented and implications, benefits, and cautions associated with use of the instrument as a college counseling tool are discussed. ********** College counselors rely on a variety of instruments to assess the needs of students experiencing academic difficulties. Existing assessment tools commonly focus on learning behaviors such as academic competence (DiPerna, 2004) and study skills (Weinstein, Schulte, & Palmer, 1987), as well as internal client factors such as motivation (Pintrich, McKeachie, & Smith, 1989) and self-regulation (VanZile-Tamsen, 2002). In the current study, we sought to develop a new instrument that could be used to assess the degree to which a student's cognitions might be contributing to his or her academic concerns. Cognitions and Academic Success According to the rational-emotive therapy (RET; Ellis, 1962, 2000) perspective, emotional problems and dysfunctional behaviors are considered to be mainly the product of irrational beliefs. Characteristic of these problematic beliefs are dogmatic and absolutistic expectations that the world should, must, or ought to be other than what it is. According to the theory, irrational beliefs may create adjustment problems when an individual forms unrealistically high, and therefore unattainable, expectations of self, of others, or for life situations because failed expectations tend to produce feelings of disappointment and disengagement (Walter & Siebert, 1993). Several studies support use of the RET perspective with college populations (Baker, McNeil, & Siryk, 1985; Harju & Eppler, 1997; Menec et al., 1994). For example, Baker et al. found that some college students tend to set unrealistically high expectations for themselves and their institutions and then tend to experience declines in academic, social, and personal-emotional adjustment when their unreasonable expectations are unmet. It follows, then, that one source of college academic difficulties may be irrational expectations students hold about the teaching-learning process. Previous researchers have extended Ellis's (1968) original work by developing counseling tools to measure clients' irrational beliefs in general among adult clinical populations (MacDonald & Games, 1972; Malouff & Schutte, 1986; Shorkey & Whiteman, 1977; Tosi, Forman, Rudy, & Murphy, 1986). Others developed tools for both clinical and nonclinical populations (Hooper & Layne, 1983; Lee, Hallberg, & Hasse, 1979). Furthermore, at least one version of these measures was designed to assess irrational beliefs about a more specific counseling problem, namely, problems associated with sexual concerns (Jordan & McCormick, 1988). However, no measures currently exist to assess beliefs about academics among college students. The present study, therefore, sought to extend previous research on unrealistic or irrational beliefs by identifying specific rational and irrational academic beliefs held by college students and translating them into an exploratory measure of academic beliefs along a rational-irrational continuum: the Academic Rational Beliefs Scale (ARBS). Our aim was to develop and validate a screening instrument that could be used by college counselors when working with students experiencing academic difficulties. Our goal was to begin establishing the psychometric properties of the instrument. We expected that the set of items identified would have internal consistency as well as a stable factor structure and that the instrument itself would have construct validity. We expected it to correlate with a published measure of rational-irrational beliefs, differentiate students by academic experience and academic performance, and detect changes in these beliefs after intervention. …