DefinePK

Abstract

Designing a scale to evaluate students' guidance and counseling (GAC) competence is crucial to ensuring that the quality of the university's output meets the practical standards required. This paper illustrates the design and psychometric properties of a GAC competency scale for Vietnamese students majoring in Primary Education. The scale consists of four subscales: general understanding of teaching and educational activities for primary school students; general understanding of primary student GAC activities; GAC skills in a hypothetical environment; and skills for applying GAC in a practical context. The scale was tested according to a standard procedure, including four stages: (1) drafting a scale; (2) formal validity testing; (3) semantic testing; and (4) statistical testing. The participants were 251 fourth-year primary education students in Vietnam. The sample was selected from universities that train primary school teachers in representative regions of Vietnam. Measurement and structural model evaluation techniques were employed. The findings showed that the scale has good reliability, with both Cronbach’s alpha and composite reliability greater than 0.7; all four components contributed to the overall GAC competence. The R-square adjusted value was 0.646, accounting for 64.6% of the variation in this variable. Therefore, the scale demonstrated strong value and reliability as an instrument for assessing the GAC competence of students majoring in Primary Education.