Evaluating a Short Form of the Academic Competence Evaluation Scales: Expanded Examination of Psychometric Properties

The Academic Competence Evaluation Scales (ACES; DiPerna and Elliott in School Psychol Rev 31(3):293, 2002) is a 73-item teacher rating scale that assesses academic skills and enablers. The ACES Short Form (ASF) is a newly extracted 32-item short form of the ACES that has promising psychometric properties (Anthony and DiPerna in School Psychol Q 32(4):552, 2017; School Mental Health 10(3):314-321, 2018). The goals of this study were to examine the factor structure and extend the psychometric assessment of three subscales of the ASF (interpersonal skills, motivation, and engagement) with an independent sample. Participants were 193 students (63.2% White; 46.1% female) in grades K through 4, in the classrooms of 12 teachers. Teachers completed three subscales of the ACES and reported on student inattention, hyperactivity/impulsivity, social functioning, and academic functioning. We also obtained parent and peer assessments of student social functioning. Results corroborated the factor structure found by Anthony and DiPerna (School Mental Health 10(3):314-321, 2018) and the high internal consistency (alpha's > .90; omega's > .80) of the three subscales. In an extension of previous work, correlations with parent, peer, and teacher report on other measures provided evidence for convergent and divergent validity of the three ASF subscales. ASF scores also differed significantly for students with and without academic, behavioral, and social difficulties, in a manner similar to that of the ACES. These findings, along with those of Anthony and DiPerna (School Psychol Q 32(4):552, 2017; School Mental Health 10(3):314-321, 2018), provide evidence that the subscales of ASF, although substantially shorter than the respective subscales of the ACES, retain the strong psychometric properties and clinical utility of the full-length measure.