Why Crocodiles? | Validation Study 2008

Validation Study 2008

We commissioned the Psychometrics Centre, University of Cambridge, to test our assessment for educational use. Cambridge is an international centre of excellence in psychological, occupational and educational assessment. Below is a summary of the overall findings of the study, carried out to confirm the identification of student behaviours through the footprint assessment.

Executive Summary

The Footprint form is a self assessment questionnaire based on four types of behaviour. As ‘you’ are the expert on yourself, the student or teacher is always asked to think of themselves at school when completing it. The form measures 4 components:

Drivers  an individual’s use of control, power and assertiveness

Influencers an individual’s approach to social situations and people

Steadiers the pace at which an individual likes to work

Calculators an individual’s approach to structure and detail

To determine the reliability and validity of the Footprint Form, analyses at both the item and instrument levels were conducted. 

The facility index of an item is the average score across respondents for that item.  All the items on the Footprint form had good facility.

The discrimination index of an item is an item’s ability to distinguish between respondents on the target construct. Some of the items are not sufficiently different from each other but are similar to tests of this nature on the market.

Item reliability is the ability of an item to be free from unsystematic errors of measurement. All the items of the Footprint form were polarised. However some items were significantly more polarised than others but are similar to tests of this nature on the market.

T-tests were conducted to identify differences between groups across learning styles. There were significant differences between male and female students on the Driver and the Influencer dimensions.  Students aged 16 and over were significantly more likely to be classified as Drivers whereas students aged 15 and under were more likely to be classified as Influencers. 

The items on the Footprint form are generally reliable and consistent across positive and negative dimensions. However the removal of a number of items on each scale would improve the overall reliability of the dimensions. Correlations between dimensions also indicate that dimensions are generally capturing different styles of learning. The Footprint form is therefore of a similar standard of tests of this nature in the marketplace.