Abstract
This study validated the school psychological capital (PsyCap) scale in the Chinese context and examined the predictive effect of PsyCap resources on academic engagement and achievement emotions. Self-report data for PsyCap resources, student engagement, enjoyment, anxiety, and boredom toward English learning were collected from 1,000 sophomores. Item-level analyses and confirmatory factor analysis were used to verify the validity of the school PsyCap scale, and structural equation modeling was applied to reveal the predictive effect of school PsyCap resources on academic engagement and achievement emotions. Results showed that the school PsyCap scale retained superior psychometric properties. Besides, PsyCap resources were demonstrated to have a positive relationship to academic engagement and enjoyment, and a negative relationship to anxiety and boredom. The effectiveness of the school PsyCap scale was verified among Chinese college students, and besides the traditional predictors, school PsyCap is also critically important for students’ academic engagement and achievement emotions. Limitations and implications are discussed.
Highlights
With the rise of positive psychology in educational research, the school PsyCap with positive psychology as the core has attracted more and more attention from scholars
Psychological captial refers to the positive psychological state or psychological resources displayed in the process of individual growth and development, which is composed of four components of hope, optimism, resilience, and self-efficacy (Luthans et al, 2007b)
Each item of the school PsyCap scale satisfies a normal distribution for both the skewness and kurtosis value conformed to the criteria suggested by Finney and DiStefano (2006), and the value of corrected item-total correlation of these items met the criteria proposed by Clark and Watson (1995)
Summary
With the rise of positive psychology in educational research, the school PsyCap with positive psychology as the core has attracted more and more attention from scholars. The notion of PsyCap was firstly proposed in the industrial-organizational contexts to act as the crucial success factor for improving competitiveness and work efficiency (Luthans et al, 2004). The beneficial impact of PsyCap on academic outcomes (e.g., engagement, achievement emotions, subjective wellbeing, and academic performance) has been valued in educational settings (Li et al, 2014; Siu et al, 2014; Datu et al, 2018; Carmona-Halty et al, 2019b; King et al, 2020). PsyCap has a significant positive effect on academic outcomes, notably, past studies mainly conducted in western contexts (Carmona-Halty et al, 2019a,b; Martínez et al, 2019), except for Li et al (2014) study, few studies have focused on the PsyCap of Mainland Chinese students. Prior studies mainly treated PsyCap construct as an observed variable without
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