New Questionnaire Measures How Students Adjust to Specialized Correctional Schools

Students attending specialized correctional schools occupy one of the most overlooked corners of educational psychology. These institutions serve adolescents whose behavior has brought them into conflict with school systems or the law, and their paths to re-engagement with learning are shaped by forces that ordinary classroom research rarely captures. Yet when researchers want to know whether a student in such a setting is actually adapting—settling into routines, reconnecting with peers, rebuilding a relationship with school itself—they have had to rely on instruments designed for mainstream students. A new study published in BMC Psychology argues that this gap matters, and it offers a purpose-built solution: a validated School Adaptation Questionnaire developed specifically for students in specialized correctional schools.

The research team, led by Hongchang Teng of Ludong University in Yantai, China, together with Yanli Liu of Zibo Municipal Hospital, Yuehua Li of Yantai Vocational College, and Moxuan Song of Ludong University, set out to do what psychometricians call scale development: the painstaking process of turning a fuzzy psychological concept into a set of questions that reliably and validly measure it. Their starting point was a straightforward observation. Although adolescent school adaptation has attracted considerable research attention, psychometrically robust assessment tools designed for students in correctional education settings were lacking. Without such tools, educators in these schools have had little systematic way to identify struggling students, evaluate interventions, or contribute comparable data to the research literature.

The team followed a standard, multi-stage scale-development procedure that is widely regarded as the gold standard in psychological measurement. First came item generation. Rather than guessing at what adaptation means in a correctional school, the researchers grounded their initial pool of questions in three complementary sources: a review of the existing literature, semi-structured interviews, and open-ended surveys. This triangulation is important because it lets the voices of the people who actually live the experience—students and the professionals around them—shape the content of the instrument before any statistical machinery is applied. The result was a preliminary scale whose items reflected the lived realities of specialized schooling rather than assumptions imported from mainstream educational contexts.

Next came the empirical winnowing. The researchers recruited a pilot sample of 210 students and subjected the preliminary items to item analysis and exploratory factor analysis, or EFA. Item analysis examines how individual questions perform: whether they discriminate between students with different levels of adaptation, whether any items are redundant or confusing, and whether each one contributes meaningfully to the scale. Exploratory factor analysis, meanwhile, is a statistical technique that looks at patterns of correlation among items to discover how many underlying dimensions—or factors—are needed to explain the data. In essence, EFA asks the data to reveal its own structure rather than imposing one from the outset. Using these tools, the team revised and optimized the preliminary scale, trimming and refining until a coherent, streamlined questionnaire emerged.

The refined instrument was then put to the test with a fresh validation sample of 270 students. Using an independent sample is a critical safeguard in scale development: it ensures that the final structure is not simply an artifact of the particular quirks of the first group. With this second dataset, the researchers conducted confirmatory factor analysis, or CFA, along with a battery of reliability and validity tests. Where EFA explores, CFA confirms. The researcher specifies in advance a model of how many factors exist and which items load on which factor, and the analysis quantifies how well that specified model reproduces the observed patterns of responses. A questionnaire that survives CFA has demonstrated that its internal architecture holds up under scrutiny.

The outcome was a final 21-item questionnaire organized into four factors: Rule Adaptation, Academic Adaptation, Peer Relations, and School Attitude. Together, these four dimensions explained 69.21 percent of the total variance in responses—a substantial share indicating that the four-factor structure captures most of what the questionnaire measures. The four factors also make intuitive sense for a correctional school context. Rule Adaptation speaks to the heightened role of institutional discipline and behavioral expectations in these settings. Academic Adaptation addresses engagement with learning itself. Peer Relations captures the social fabric of the school, and School Attitude reflects the emotional bond, positive or negative, that a student forms with the institution. The inclusion of rule adaptation as a distinct dimension is precisely the kind of content that generic school-adjustment scales tend to miss.

The statistical evidence for the final model was strong. Confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated an adequate model fit, with a chi-square to degrees-of-freedom ratio of 1.467, a root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) of 0.045, a normed fit index (NFI) of 0.918, a Tucker-Lewis index (TLI) of 0.968, and a comparative fit index (CFI) of 0.972. For readers unfamiliar with these metrics, the chi-square ratio is expected to fall below roughly 3 for a good model, and RMSEA values below 0.05 indicate close fit. The NFI, TLI, and CFI all range from 0 to 1, with values above 0.90 conventionally considered acceptable and values above 0.95 excellent. By these standards, the four-factor model fits the validation data remarkably well, suggesting the questionnaire measures a stable, coherent structure rather than statistical noise.

Reliability—the consistency of measurement—was equally impressive. The overall Cronbach’s alpha coefficient for the full 21-item scale was 0.94, a value indicating that students who score high on some items tend to score high on the others, and that the instrument would likely yield similar results if administered to comparable students under comparable conditions. The alpha values for the four subscales ranged from 0.81 to 0.92, comfortably above the 0.70 threshold typically regarded as acceptable for research instruments. Taken together with the structural validity evidence, the authors conclude that the School Adaptation Questionnaire for students in specialized correctional schools possesses excellent psychometric properties, with strong reliability and structural validity.

Why does this matter beyond the technical details? Assessment is the foundation of evidence-based practice in any educational setting. In mainstream schools, decades of validated measurement have allowed researchers to track how adjustment predicts achievement, mental health, and long-term outcomes, and to evaluate whether programs actually work. Students in specialized correctional schools deserve the same standard of care, but until now the measurement toolkit has lagged behind. A validated questionnaire gives teachers and counselors a common language for describing student adjustment, gives administrators a way to monitor progress across a school or a system, and gives researchers an instrument that can support rigorous evaluation of correctional education programs. The authors describe it as a valid evaluation tool for both research and practice in specialized correctional education.

The study also carries broader lessons for measurement science. It demonstrates how a careful, theory-driven, multi-stage process—literature review and qualitative interviews to generate items, exploratory analysis with one sample to shape the structure, and confirmatory analysis with an independent sample to validate it—can produce a robust instrument even for a population that has long been neglected by mainstream psychology. The work was approved by the research ethics committee of Ludong University, conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and carried out with informed consent from participants or, for those under sixteen, from their parents or legal guardians. As correctional and specialized education systems around the world grapple with how best to help vulnerable adolescents re-enter society, tools like this questionnaire offer something deceptively simple but powerful: a reliable way to see whether, and how, those students are finding their footing.

Subject of Research: Development and validation of a school adaptation questionnaire for students in specialized correctional schools

Article Title: School adjustment scale for students in specialized schools: development and initial validation

Article References: School adjustment scale for students in specialized schools: development and initial validation. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05684-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05684-y

Keywords: psychometrics, school adjustment, specialized correctional schools, scale development, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, reliability, validity, educational psychology, adolescents, questionnaire validation, BMC Psychology