Strengthening School Connectedness to Increase Student Success
Category: Student Well-Being
Instrument Overview
The New General Self-Efficacy Scale (NGSE) is a short self-report survey that measures a person’s overall belief in their ability to handle challenges and complete tasks. It focuses on general confidence rather than confidence in a specific subject or skill. The scale typically includes a small set of Likert-style items (for example, statements that respondents rate from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”). It produces a single overall score rather than multiple subscales, making it easy to interpret and use across settings.
The NGSE is often used for research, program evaluation, and needs assessment. In education, it can help schools understand students’ or staff members’ sense of confidence in managing academic, social, or work-related demands. It is most commonly used with older students (secondary and postsecondary) and adults, though it can be adapted for younger groups with support. The scale was developed as an update to earlier general self-efficacy measures to improve clarity and consistency across items. (see more detail about the development history below). It is not tied to specific academic standards, but it aligns broadly with goals related to student agency, persistence, and social-emotional learning.</p>
Development history: The New General Self-Efficacy Scale (NGSE) consists of the seven NGSE items Chen and Gully (1997) had found to be distinct from the SGSE scale and self-esteem. Because the authors wanted to ensure that the content domain of GSE would be well captured by the NGSE scale, they created seven additional NGSE items, intending to eliminate redundancies later. Consistent with procedures employed by Chen and Gully, when wording the new items, authors carefully referred to Eden‘s GSE conceptualization, which is consistent with definitions provided by other researchers (Gardner & Pierce, 1998; Judge et al., 1997; Judge, Erez, et al.,1998). Each of the first two authors independently generated between three and five new items. The authors combined the items and rewrote or eliminated any that were poorly worded, were clear duplicates, or seemed inconsistent with their GSE definition. The third author then reviewed the items for clarity, consistency with theory, and redundancy. This effort yielded a total of 14 NGSE items, 7 of which were new and 7 carried over from Chen and Gully‘s study.
Organization
Topic
Collection Category(ies)
American Institutes for Research® partnered with the Annenberg Institute at Brown University to collect instruments related to student well-being.
Content
Grades
Post secondary
Keywords
Student Well-Being ; Social-Emotional Competence ; Self Awareness ; Self-Efficacy
Languages
English
Respondent
Student
Administration Information
Length
3 minutes
Administration
Paper
Psychometrics (additional guidance)
Psychometric References
Chen, G., Gully, S. M., & Eden, D. (2001). Validation of a new general self-efficacy scale. Organizational Research Methods, 4(1), 62-83. https://doi.org/10.1177/109442810141004
Chen, G., Gully, S. M., & Eden, D. (2004). General self-efficacy and self-esteem: Toward theoretical and empirical distinction between correlated self-evaluations. Journal of Organizational Behavior: The International Journal of Industrial, Occupational and Organizational Psychology and Behavior, 25(3), 375-395. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.251
Scherbaum, C. A., Cohen-Charash, Y., & Kern, M. J. (2006). Measuring general self-efficacy: A comparison of three measures using item response theory. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 66(6), 1047-1063.
