Validation of Authentic Educational Courage Construct in Students and Graduates of Iran's Higher Education System

The purpose of this study was to measure the constructive validity of authentic educational courage, which in past researches was not paid much attention to it, and this tool was validated in students and graduates of Iran's higher education system. The current research in terms of purpose was applied and in terms of implementation method was cross-sectional. The research population was all the students and graduates of different academic courses of the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology of the country in 6 provinces of the three northern, middle and southern regions in the 2011-2020 years The sample size of the research subject based on the five dimensions of the mentioned structure, for at least 100 people for each dimension, finally considering the adequacy of the sample size was 636 people who were selected by multi-stage cluster random sampling method. The research tool was a demographic information form and a researcher-made questionnaire of authentic educational courage with 23 real final states, which whose psychometric indicators were examined. The data were analyzed and validated by the symmetric rank multidimensional scaling method. The coordinates used to form the distance matrix of the points were taken directly from the output of the network analysis under the lwmds algorithm. The results of the research showed that according to the opinion of experts and specialists in the authentic educational courage construct, number of 9 states that were not compatible with external objective facts and rational logic were removed from the final questionnaire and finally 23 states out of 32 possible states were kept for it. This tool has five two level dimensions were including dimensions of goal (with two levels of functional learning and mastery learning), cognitive covert action (with two levels without mindfulness/unrealistic evaluation and mindfulness /real evaluation), emotional-functional overt action (with two levels of cowardice and bravely), response continuity (with two levels of non-continuity of response and continuity of response) and originality of response (with two levels of inauthentic/non-integrity of behavior and authentic/integrity of behavior), which whose validity is confirmed by the opinion of experts and specialists and its reliability is supported by the three-dimensional model selected from all the dimension for the exploratory definition of the authentic educational courage construct, after the complete fitting of the mentioned model with the experimental data obtained from the questionnaire items and the membership of each point to one of the levels of the five dimension was confirmed. The results of this study indicated the appropriate validity of the authentic educational courage construct in the studied sample. Therefore, it seems that this tool can be used as a basis for measuring authentic educational courage of learners by experts and researchers, especially in the field of educational sciences.