The Psychometric Assessment of GRIT using Rasch Measurement Model for Vernacular Students Setting

Abstract

In facing a competitive global landscape and an uncertain future, fostering a national character rooted in grit emerges as a critical necessity. Grit stands out as a multifaceted trait encompassing perseverance of effort and consistency of interest over an extended period. The innovative and groundbreaking research that contributes new insights to the field by improving the validity and reliability on quality of items in assessing grit for vernacular setting among Tamil students who rarely explored. Hence, this study will focus on the setting of vernacular students consist of Tamil National Type Primary School (SJKT) in Negeri Sembilan. The study aimed to test whether grit measurement items have good psychometric properties in the context of SJKT students based on Rasch analysis. Two grit constructs have been applied in this study such as perseverance and interest. The survey with quantitative approach was applied. Cluster sampling technique was used to select a total of 93 SJKT students studying in Year 6 from two districts in Negeri Sembilan. The total of 11 from 12 items met the requirements of Rasch’s statistical modelling using WINSTEPS 3.68.2 software. This psychometrics properties also reports on the strength of items through graphical analysis such as Wright Map. Person reliability shows the reading of 0.78 and item reliability shows of 0.84. Meanwhile, person separation is at 1.88 and item separation at 2.32 proved that items and persons can be categorized by the difficulty and ability. Cronbach Alpha shows the reading of 0.89 for internal consistency evidence. An implication of this is the possibility to generate more difficult items for SJKT students to measure grit and expand the impact of grit measurement that only focus on psychology part, but also the psychometric field. It is recommended that future studies can be conducted to examine the suitability of items using few other new settings such as Sekolah Kebangsaan (SK), Sekolah Jenis Kebangsaan Cina (SJKC) and private primary schools in Negeri Sembilan with larger samples. Future study for these items could be used as a self and peers -assessment for the self-improvement purpose in grit.