Reliability and Construct Validity of New Measures of Career Maturity for 11th-Grade Students

Career Assessment and the Cognitive Vocational Maturity Test

“…Also, high scorers report that they know what steps to follow in making career decisions, that they &dquo;know exactly how much education is required for an occupation that I may enter,&dquo; and that they are sure &dquo;where I can get a job when I finish my education.&dquo; Form AB of the Self-Knowledge scale is composed of 25 items and is a revision of the May 1983 research edition and the September 1983 revised research edition, both of which are a part of the Career Planning Questionnaire (Westbrook, 1983a(Westbrook, , 1983b(Westbrook, , 1983c(Westbrook, , 1983d. The development of the Self-Knowledge scale is described in other publications (Westbrook, Sanford, Merwin, Fleenor, and Renzi, 1987;. Table 1 Sample Items From the CVMT The following specifications were used in the development of the original Self-Knowledge scale: (a) The scale content must be appropriate for llthgrade students and should, whenever appropriate, include student-generated item content; (b) the content of the scale should be homogeneous; (c) the individual items should have point-biserials no lower than .30; (d) the internal consistency reliability for the scale should be in the .80s or higher; (e) the scale should yield only one score; (f) the scale should yield a heterogeneous distribution of scores that will clearly differentiate students at different levels of that trait; (g) the item format would be agree-disagree; (h) the scale would be composed of 20 to 30 items; and (i) the scale would be a self-report measure of knowledge, not a measure of actual knowledge Westbrook, Sanford, & Youngblood, 1987).…”