Psychometric Evaluation of the Academic Resilience Scale (ARS-30) in Iran

1. PHD Student, Department of psychology, Marvdasht Branch, Islamic Azad University, Marvdasht, Iran. Email: aliram53@yahoo.com 2. Assistant Professor, Department of psychology, Marvdasht Branch, Islamic Azad University, Marvdasht, Iran *Corresponding author email: Maryam_kouroshnia@miau.ac.ir 3. Professor, Department of psychology, Marvdasht Branch, Islamic Azad University, Marvdasht, Iran 4. Assistant Professor, Department of psychology, Marvdasht Branch, Islamic Azad University, Marvdasht, Iran Introduction Improving the quality of education and empowering students is paramount in any educational system, as it is one of the most important developmental factors in society. Researchers in this field are increasingly trying to identify the factors that influence their role in quality and empowerment of students. One of the most important individual, yet non-educational factors that can affect students’ academic quality is resilience. Resilience is defined by patterns of positive adjustment in the face of adversity (Riley & Masten, 2005). Several studies have investigated the relationship between resiliency with various academic factors including academic support and academic vitality (Fathi & Jamalabadi, 2017), academic burnout (Taheri Kharameh, Sharififard, Asayesh, & Sepahvandi, 2017), Perception of Learning Environment (Bahrami, Amiri, & Abdollahi, 2017), Competency Perception (Mirzaee, Kiamanesh, Hejazi, & Banijamali, 2016), Academic Self-Handicapping (Laki, Shokri, Sepahmansuor, & Ebrahimi, 2018) and Academic Achievement (Sandoval-Hernandez & Cortes, 2012) has been addressed. Typically, students in the classroom and school are faced with a variety of educational challenges, sometimes due to lack of knowledge of how to deal with these challenges, and sometimes lead to a decline in educational status and even their dropout; on the contrary, some students are able to coping with problems, and ultimately achieve an academic status despite numerous obstacles, problems, and academic challenges. They believe Abstract: Over the past two decades, academic resilience has encouraged a great deal of research. However, there is a clear shortage of suitable standard tools for assessing academic resilience in Iran. The purpose of this study was to investigate the validity and reliability of the Academic Resilience Scale (ARS-30) in Iran. For this aim, 409 high school students (202 girls and 207 boys) completed the Academic Resilience Scale and self-regulation scale. Criterion validity analysis showed that there is a correlation between academic resilience scale and academic self-regulation. The results of factor analysis of the content of the scale in terms of principal components revealed there are three factors i.e. Represents Perseverance, Reflecting and Adaptive Help-seeking, and Negative Affect and Emotional Response. Internal consistency analysis showed that items related to each factor had the most significant correlation with the total score of that factor. There was also a significant correlation between the scores for each factor and the total score. The reliability of this scale was calculated by Cronbach’s alpha coefficient and test-retest method. Generally, the results showed that the academic resiliency scale has good psychometric properties and can be used as a valid and reliable tool for Iranian students.