Scientific Validation of Student Competency Scale (SCS) Questionnaire for Assessing the Impact of Happiness Curriculum in Indian Government Schools

The education systems are experiencing a crisis globally as it is no longer enough for students to develop reading and numeracy skills alone. On the other end, the Happiness Index of India, 2024, showcases a poor stand universally, which has been proven to have a detrimental effect on academic performance and the holistic development of learners. In this line, the Happiness Curriculum (HC) was launched in Delhi, 2018, a first step in broadening the traditional public education system to embrace attention to the wholesome development of its students. This soon branched into Uttarakhand, a state ranked one among the three unhappiest states in the nation, under the name "Anandam Pathyacharya". Later, to measure student competencies developed through HC implementation, Brookings, 2020, developed and validated Student Competency Scale (SCS), a tool with 14 items across four subscales, namely Decision Making, Focus, Empathy and Relationships. Here, the scale was adopted and validated among 140 upper primary students in Uttarakhand, India, by incorporating standardised validation procedures such as Bartletts Test of Sphericity, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin, Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Cronbach’s Alpha calculation using SPSS AMOS v26. Sample adequacy was confirmed (0.921). CFA confirmed the scales’ four-dimensional structure with strong factor loadings and model fit indices, while the internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha) was high (0.927). Thus, this validation endeavour establishes the scale as a reliable tool to gauge student competencies in the context of the HC. By highlighting the SCS's scientific foundations and how it might be applied to India's educational system, the study offers a scope to measure HC's impact on learners' development.