Development of an instrument to measure students’ acceptance of technologically-enhanced personal, academic and professional development portfolios

This paper presents development of an instrument, designed to measure students' acceptance of technologically-enhanced personal, academic and professional portfolios, also known as e-portfolios. E-portfolios are becoming popular as an important pedagogical, academic and professional development tool. However their acceptance is still a challenge for higher education institutions. By measuring students' acceptance, we can get insight of students' behaviour, which can then guide practitioners to provide better e-portfolio solutions. The paper contributes to theory and practice in relation to e-portfolios and presents a unique point of view to measure students’ acceptance of e-portfolios. Based on the Decomposed Theory of Planned Behaviour (DTPB), the paper identifies influencing factors on technology acceptance behaviour and explains the development of the instrument. The data was collected from 204 undergraduate students in order to establish reliability and validity of the measures, with the instrument statistically analysed using a confirmatory analysis approach. The results demonstrated acceptable levels of reliability and validity for a parsimonious instrument of 32 items providing a valuable tool to measure e-portfolio acceptance by students both in this and future studies.