Refinement and Psychometric Evaluation of the Executive Skills Questionnaire-Revised

Abstract

Executive functioning (EF) skills are vital for academic success. Along with the recent explosion of interventions targeting these skills comes the need for affordable, efficient, and ecologically valid measures for planning\xa0and tailoring\xa0interventions and monitoring outcomes. The current study describes the refinement and initial psychometric evaluation of the Executive Skills Questionnaire-Revised (ESQ-R), a self-report EF rating scale that integrates current scientific understanding of core EF processes with an ecologically valid understanding of EF skills (ESs) that is directly applicable to academic contexts and tasks and tied to available interventions. We describe reduction of an initial 61-item pool to a final 25-item version using a series of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses with 347 participants. Psychometric evidence for the 25-item version is promising, with excellent internal consistency (alpha\u2009=\u2009.91), adequate test-retest reliability for a small subsample (.70 with no effects of time delay on score variability), moderate correlations with other EF rating scales (.56–.74) and psychological symptom scales (.38–.55), and a significant correlation with academic engagement (−\u2009.40).