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The validity of international instruments for assessing South African engineering students

This study examines the validity of three international instruments for assessing South African first-year engineering students. The Grit-S, Dweck's Implicit Theories of Intelligence Scale (ITIS), and the Revised Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Visualisation of Rotations (PSVT:R) were assessed for internal functioning and usefulness in predicting engineering drawing subject marks. Grit-S and ITIS were chosen as they may offer potential areas for intervention to enhance psycho-social adjustment to university. The PSVT: R was administered as it was expected to have a relationship with engineering drawing, and spatial reasoning is a skill that can be taught, which will assist first-year engineering students. The study found that Grit-S was not internally reliable and valid for assessing our engineering students. Both Grit-S and ITIS had low discrimination, with most students strongly agreeing with the statements. The overly positive responses to the instruments led to no predictive power. The PSVT:R had a small but significant relationship to the engineering drawing semester mark as well as evidence for internal reliability and validity. Constructs such as Grit and mindset may need to be recontextualised for the African setting, or the instruments would need to be redesigned to offer greater discrimination power. Only the PSVT:R showed some potential for predicting first-year engineering achievement in the graphics module.