Competency Characteristics Of Postgraduates Majoring In Psychology: Models, Evaluation Tools And Applied Research

Currently,situational judgment test was widely treated as an effective tool to measure competencies of personality traits,self-concepts and motivations by scholars.However,there were not any domestic researches using situational judgment test to measure the competencies of psychological postgraduate.In this study,we determined the dimensions of psychology postgraduate competencies by means of analyzing the graduate students' learning task and referring to the results of previous studies.Then,using semi-structured interview,focus group discussion and questionnaire,we have collected some typical situational events in life and behavioral responses,and finally constructed the situational judgment test including 35 items.234 psychological postgraduates were pretested with the situational judgment test.Psychometric Analysis on pretesting results showed that the compiled test had good reliability with the coefficient of internal consistency arriving at 0.89.In addition,separate factor analyses in each of the departments of psychology and chemistry produced seven factors which were fairly consistent with respect to item loadings across fields.Seven factors respectively accounted for 54.8%and 58.9% of total variation of 35 items in two fields.However,the order of each factor was different in the two majors.Specifically,Independence &Initiative and Conscientiousness were the top two factors gained by psychological department,and Conscientiousness and Perseverance factors emerged firstly in turn for data collected from chemistry department.Critical Facility and Research & Experiment were the final two factors which had the consistent rankings in both psychology and chemistry departments.According to the classification perspectives about competency,we assumed that the seven factors could be divided into two categories.One was called‘task-oriented self competence' including these four factors of Independence &Initiative,Conscientiousness,Perseverance,and Research & Experiment.The other named ‘relation-oriented interpersonal competency' included these three factors of Involvement,Communication and Critical Facility.According to the results above,the situational judgment test(SJT)in this study could reflect the content and structure of the competency of psychological postgraduates,and could be used in practice.In the next stage of research,we selected 1002 psychology graduate students as subjects investigated.Objective to study the demographic features of competency in psychological postgraduates,and the correlation between the SJT measures and Personal Potential Index(PPI),and further explore the predicting effect of psychology postgraduate competency on research performance,and the mediating effect of Research Self-Efficacy(RSE)on both of them with hierarchical regression.The main conclusions were as follow:Firstly,the female postgraduates were significantly greater than the male postgraduates on ‘Independence and Initiative' and ‘Research and Experimentation';the graduate students in grade two and grade three were significantly greater than in grade one on ‘Communication' and ‘Research and Experimentation';the graduate students from ‘211 Project' universities was significantly greater than from the ‘985 Project' universities and other universities on ‘Conscientiousness',‘Communication' and ‘Research and Experimentation'.Secondly,there was a positive correlation between the SJT and PPI scores of psychology graduate students,which showed that both of them were compatible and could be used to evaluate non-cognitive factors.Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that competence measures and PPI index could both predict research self-efficacy(i.e.subjective research performance)and there was significant difference on prediction.Competence measures could add explained variances to research self-efficacy on the basis of entrance scores and PPI index.Thirdly,the competencies that could affect research performance were different between male and female postgraduates.‘Independence and Initiative' and‘Communication' were more important to male graduates,and‘Conscientiousness' and ‘Involvement' were more important to female postgraduates.For graduate students in different grades,the competencies had different impact on research performance.‘Research and Experiment' was the quality that Junior graduate students should have,and ‘Communication' was a very important quality for senior graduate students.Furthly,competence measures of graduate students in psychology could not only directly influence,but also indirectly influence Research Output(RO)through research self-efficacy.In other words,research self-efficacy had a partial mediating effect between postgraduate competency and research output.