The Global Engagement Survey: Scales and Questions
The assessment tool was first developed in 2015 by researchers and practitioners who were interested in conducting assessment of critical student global and civic learning in a manner that offered inter-institutional comparison, a robust dataset, a shared learning community, and - through coordination - enhanced affordability. The survey questions are publicly available, and available for download here. Members of the Community-based Global Learning Collaborative (the Collaborative) have the unique benefit of utilizing the survey, reports, and cleaned data managed by the Collaborative. Benefits vary by membership level, and more details are on this page. Further, member organizations become part of the GES Community of Practice, which is a multi-institutional group of professionals dedicated to improving global learning through assessment and research.
GES scales were validated drawing on data gathered between 2015 and 2017. More than 1,300 students from 28 different institutions and 240 distinct global learning programs took part in the validation process. The validity, or accuracy, of the three components of global learning and eight sub-scales was confirmed using the data reduction procedures principal component analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. The reliability, or internal consistency of the scales, were tested using Cronbach’s alpha statistics. The specifics of the validation and reliability process are detailed here.
Conceptualization of Global Learning Components and Scales
Each component of global learning relates to at least one (critical reflection) or as many as five (global citizenship) scales. The conceptualization of components and scales appear below. For more on the critical, intercultural, and civic literatures that informed the construction of these conceptualizations and scales, see Hartman, Kiely, Boettcher, & Friedrichs, 2018.
Cultural Humility: A commitment to critical self-reflection and lifelong re-evaluation of assumptions, increasing one’s capacities for appropriate behaviors and actions in varying cultural contexts. This capacity for appropriate, culturally relevant action is coupled with awareness of one’s positionality within systems of power, and aligned in service of Collaborative re-considering and re-constructing assumptions and systems to enact a deeper and broader embrace of shared dignity, redressing historic inequities. Two scales interrogate components of cultural humility:
Openness to Diversity: One’s comfort with and interest in learning from and interacting across various forms of cultural difference.
Cultural Adaptability: One’s awareness of oneself as a cultural being, working to adapt behaviors appropriately for varying cultural contexts.
Critical Reflection: Engaging in a learning process that recognizes and critiques ideology (political, economic, social, and cultural), uncovers hegemonic assumptions, and examines relations of power with the goal of becoming critically aware of how each distorts our worldview. One scale interrogates critical reflection.
Global Citizenship: Global citizenship is a commitment to fundamental human dignity, couched in a critically reflective understanding of historic and contemporary systems of oppression, along with acknowledgment of positionality within those systems; it connects with values, reflection, and action. A critical global citizenship calls us all to humble, careful, and continuous effort to build a world that better acknowledges every individual’s basic human dignity. Five scales consider components of global citizenship:
Civic Efficacy: One’s comfort and confidence in respect to one’s own capacity to make meaningful civic contributions, locally and internationally.
Conscious Consumption: One’s professed intentionality regarding the use of one’s own economic resources to advance just outcomes through consumer practices.
Political Voice: One’s intentions to use one’s civic voice.
Global Civic Responsibility: One’s belief in shared human dignity, as expressed through a global sense of community membership and civic identity.
Human Rights Beliefs: One’s belief in fundamental human dignity, coupled with governments’ responsibility to promote and protect that dignity through human rights.