QUESTIONÁRIO DE DIFICULDADES ANTECIPADAS DE ADAPTAÇÃO AO ENSINO SUPERIOR (QDAA-ES): VALIDAÇÃO

Abstract

The process of democratization in higher education in Brazil has caused a significant increase in the number of students in the past years, a group characterized by its heterogeneity due to several factors such as gender, social class, age, objectives and professional plans. Therefore, understanding the main difficulties experienced by these students during their first year of graduation, allows us to identify and measure the social, motivational and cognitive indicators related to academic adaptation and success. The objective of this paper was to contribute for the adaptation and validation of the Anticipated Adaptation Difficulties Questionnaire to higher education, originally proposed by Araújo and colleagues (2016) for undergraduate students in Portugal, to the Brazilian reality. The questionnaire was applied to a sample of 332 first-year undergraduate students in courses offered by the Federal Institute of Alagoas (IFAL-Campus Maceió). Most participants were male students enrolled in evening courses, aged between 16 and 65 years old. An exploratory factor analysis was carried out  by using principal component method in order to determine the grouping of items by factors, allowing the reduction of the scale structure in three dimensions of difficulties: academic, regarding difficulties in terms of learning and organization school life; autonomy, which refer to situations of financial management, emotions and daily activities; and interpersonal, concerning difficulties of interaction and social integration and the management of previous social relationships. The indicators of precision and validity have shown to be suitable to the use of the questionnaire in the investigation on the processes of transition and adaptation of higher education students.

Keywords: Higher Education; Academic difficulties; 1st year undergraduate Students; Academic transition