Assessing students’ intercultural competence: Construction and psychometric evaluation of a brief measure

Intercultural competence has been placed increasing attention in globalized educational systems. The study presents a series of qualitative and quantitative investigations to construct and validate scores on a brief self-report measure assessing intercultural competence of university students. Following a comprehensive literature search and qualitative expert reviews in the scale construction process, 50 potential items were classified based on the attitudinal, cognitive, and behavioral intercultural competence framework. In the psychometric evaluation process, a unidimensional structure was obtained to represent the 50 items. Item response theory analysis was performed to yield a brief measure of five content-specific items measuring intercultural competence, capturing cross-cultural self-efficacy, cultural knowledge application, perspective taking/suspending judgment, and behavioral regulation in intercultural situations. Not just contributing to measurement advancement, but the newly developed and validated instrument holds promise for guiding the design of intercultural competence educational programs and assessing students’ intercultural competence performances/gains. •Intercultural competence can be measured unidimensionally.•The new measure assesses multifacetedness of intercultural competence.•A pool of items on intercultural competence from existing literature was identified.•Contemporary psychometric guidelines were followed in instrument construction.•The new measure is useful in guiding the design/assessment of educational programs.