Confidence to Perform in the Global Marketplace: Constructing and Validating a Survey Instrument for Community College Students.

This article discusses the construction and validation of an instrument to gauge community college students' confidence to perform in the global marketplace. The instrument was designed to capture students' beliefs in their own abilities to successfully carry out job-related tasks in cross-cultural work environments that are globally-interconnected and constantly at flux. The instrument items emerged from a comprehensive review of literature, nationwide workforce skills initiatives, rounds of expert panel analyses, and focus groups. Items were formulated within Bandura's framework of self-efficacy, and the instrument was analyzed with Rasch measurement. The Rasch analysis, conducted on a sample of 741 students, provided evidence of the content validity of the items, the generalizability of the measure, and its external validity. The instrument can offer useful feedback to community college internationalization-focused staff in their efforts to assess outcomes of international initiatives for community college students, thus supporting program assessment, evaluation of student growth, and institutional decision-making.