Nowicki Preschool and Primary Internal-External Control Scale

Abstract

The Nowicki Preschool and Primary Internal-External Control Scale (PPNSIE) is an extensively utilized psychometric instrument developed by Stephen Nowicki Jr. and Marshall P. Duke in 1974. Designed specifically to assess generalized locus of control expectancies in early childhood—predominantly spanning ages four to seven or eight (preschool through early primary grades)—the PPNSIE bridges a critical developmental gap in psychological measurement. Grounded in Julian B. Rotter’s Social Learning Theory, the scale operationalizes the degree to which young children perceive events, reinforcements, and life outcomes as contingent upon their own personal behavior and effort (an internal locus of control) versus external forces such as luck, chance, fate, or powerful others (an external locus of control).

The scale consists of 34 items administered individually as a structured, oral-interview protocol featuring a dichotomous (Yes/No) response format. Of these 34 items, 26 assess generalized locus of control orientations across multiple developmental domains—including interpersonal relationships, academic and athletic performance, health behaviors, and compliance—while 8 items function as embedded filler or social desirability/lie indices designed to detect acquiescence and evaluation apprehension. The PPNSIE is scored by summing external responses, such that higher overall scores indicate a more externalized attributional style. Psychometric investigations have substantiated its split-half reliability (ranging from .68 to .79) and test-retest stability (coefficients between .65 and .79 across moderate temporal intervals), while construct, convergent, and discriminant validities have been established through robust correlations with developmental maturity, academic achievement, behavioral persistence, and observational indices of self-regulation. The PPNSIE remains a foundational tool in developmental psychology, clinical child assessment, and educational research.

Keywords

PPNSIE, Nowicki Preschool and Primary Internal-External Control Scale, locus of control, early childhood assessment, social learning theory, Julian Rotter, internal locus of control, external locus of control, developmental psychometrics, attributional style, pediatric psychology, social desirability.

Authors

The Nowicki Preschool and Primary Internal-External Control Scale was constructed and psychometrically validated by Stephen Nowicki, Jr., Ph.D., and Marshall P. Duke, Ph.D. Both authors have maintained prolific, long-standing academic careers in the Department of Psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, United States.

Dr. Stephen Nowicki, Jr., is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Emory University. A renowned clinical psychologist, Dr. Nowicki dedicated decades of research to nonverbal communication, social learning paradigms, and the lifespan trajectory of internal versus external control expectancies. Dr. Marshall P. Duke, also a Charles Howard Candler Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Emory, has published extensively on clinical child psychology, family narratives, nonverbal interpersonal distance, and developmental psychopathology. Together, Nowicki and Duke formulated a comprehensive suite of locus of control measures spanning the entire human life course, including the Children’s Nowicki-Strickland Internal-External Control Scale (CNSIE), the Preschool and Primary version (PPNSIE), the Adult Nowicki-Strickland Internal-External Scale (ANSIE), and the Geriatric Internal-External Scale (GIE).

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Nowicki Preschool and Primary Internal-External Control Scale is to measure the generalized expectancy of reinforcement control among preschool- and early primary-aged children (chronological ages 4 to 8 years). Prior to the publication of the PPNSIE in 1974, developmental researchers faced acute methodological limitations when attempting to assess causal attributions and perceived agency in very young children. While Rotter’s (1966) Internal-External (I-E) Scale had become the gold standard for adult populations, its complex, forced-choice format and advanced vocabulary rendered it inaccessible to pediatric populations. Similarly, while Bialer’s (1961) scale and Crandall, Katkovsky, and Crandall’s (1965) Intellectual Achievement Responsibility (IAR) questionnaire made strides in measuring attributional style in middle childhood, they were heavily reliant on advanced reading literacy, concentrated almost exclusively on scholastic/intellectual domains, or exhibited unacceptable psychometric instability when adapted downward for children under eight years of age.

To overcome these developmental hurdles, Nowicki and Duke devised the PPNSIE with several explicit clinical and empirical objectives:

• Capturing Generalized Expectancies in Early Development: Rather than confining measurement to academic or intellectual successes and failures, the PPNSIE evaluates the child’s pervasive sense of contingency across everyday social interactions, physical activities, health-related occurrences (e.g., catching a cold), parental dynamics, and peer relationships.
• Oral, Low-Cognitive-Load Administration: Recognizing that children between ages 4 and 8 are non-readers or emerging readers with limited working memory capacity, the scale was engineered for one-on-one auditory administration. Questions are phrased using simple, concrete language that can be grasped without requiring complex hypothetical deductions or meta-cognitive abstractions.
• Identification of Learned Helplessness and Vulnerability: In clinical settings, the PPNSIE serves as an early identification mechanism for maladaptive attributional styles. Children who systematically manifest an extreme external locus of control often display symptoms of learned helplessness, passivity, high evaluation anxiety, and diminished behavioral persistence in the face of academic or interpersonal setbacks.
• Evaluation of Early Childhood Interventions: Educational and clinical researchers employ the scale as a pre- and post-intervention outcome measure to assess whether preschool enrichment programs, socio-emotional learning (SEL) curricula, or parent-child interaction therapies successfully foster an autonomous, internally oriented sense of agency.
• Controlling for Acquiescence and Social Desirability: Because young children exhibit strong tendencies toward affirmative response bias (“yea-saying”) and eager-to-please compliance when interacting with adult examiners, the PPNSIE was explicitly structured with embedded social desirability items to detect and isolate systematic response distortions.

Psychological Construct

The underlying construct evaluated by the PPNSIE is locus of control of reinforcement, a fundamental personality dimension reflecting a generalized belief system concerning who or what determines the significant outcomes, rewards, and punishments in one’s life. The scale conceptualizes this construct along a continuum anchored by two theoretical polarities:

1. Internal Locus of Control

An internal locus of control represents the generalized expectancy that one’s personal behavior, diligence, competence, decisions, and instrumental effort directly govern the reinforcements one experiences. A preschooler with an internal orientation believes that interpersonal outcomes (e.g., making a friend, calming an upset peer) and physical outcomes (e.g., winning a game, avoiding illness) are functionally contingent upon their own behavioral execution. For example, when an internally oriented child is asked, “When someone your age wants to be your enemy, is there anything you can do to make him or her like you?”, they endorse the belief that their proactive socio-relational behaviors possess causal efficacy. Internality in early childhood is strongly linked to self-directed task persistence, intrinsic motivation, adaptive problem-solving strategies, and high delay of gratification.

2. External Locus of Control

Conversely, an external locus of control represents the conviction that reinforcements, outcomes, and life events are unrelated to one’s behavioral inputs, instead being dictated by capricious external forces. Within the PPNSIE, externality is manifested across three primary sub-facets:

• Powerful Others: The belief that figures of authority (parents, teachers) or dominant peers wield total, unalterable control over outcomes regardless of the child’s actions (e.g., “Should your Mommy and Daddy decide what you should do?”).
• Chance, Luck, and Superstition: Attribution of events to magical thinking, talismanic objects, or arbitrary fortune (e.g., “Do you believe that wishing can make good things happen?” or “Do you have a good luck charm?”).
• Fate and Inevitability / Learned Helplessness: The perception that circumstances are predetermined, unchangeable, or that one is inherently incapable of rectifying negative situations (e.g., “When you do something wrong is there little you can do to make it right again?” or “When people were mean to you, was it usually for no reason at all?”).

From a developmental psychometrics standpoint, young children naturally begin life with more externalized orientations due to their genuine, objective dependence upon adult caregivers for survival, physical protection, and emotional regulation. As children progress through early childhood and assimilate causal contingencies, their attributional systems typically migrate toward greater internality. The PPNSIE measures the child’s relative standing along this developmental trajectory, differentiating age-appropriate external reliance from clinically problematic, chronic learned helplessness.

3. The Social Desirability / Lie Dimension

The PPNSIE incorporates eight embedded buffer items (such as “Do you always do the right things?” and “Do you sometimes tell a little lie?”). These items do not contribute to the locus of control score; instead, they measure social desirability, defensiveness, and acquiescence bias. These items present culturally pervasive, universally minor infractions that virtually all young children commit. Answering in an overly virtuous, self-laudatory direction signals high defensiveness or a rigid desire to gain examiner approval, alerting clinicians that the child’s locus of control profile may be distorted by social presentation demands.

Theoretical Framework

The PPNSIE is fundamentally rooted in Julian B. Rotter’s (1954, 1966) Social Learning Theory of personality, complemented by developmental principles from Jean Piaget and Albert Bandura.

Rotter’s Social Learning Formula

Rotter posited that the potential for any specific behavior to occur in a given psychological situation is a function of the individual’s expectancy that the behavior will lead to a particular reinforcement, coupled with the psychological value placed on that reinforcement:

Behavior Potential (BP) = f(Expectancy [E] & Reinforcement Value [RV])

In novel or ambiguous situations where specific behavioral expectancies have not yet crystallized, individuals rely on generalized expectancies derived from cumulative historical experiences. Locus of control represents one such generalized expectancy. If a child repeatedly experiences contingent reinforcement—where effort yields parental praise, sharing yields reciprocal peer play, and hand-washing reduces infectious illness—the child develops a generalized internal expectancy that behavior and reinforcement are causally coupled. Conversely, if a child is raised in an erratic, unpredictable, or harshly punitive environment where outcomes occur independently of their behavior, the child adopts a generalized external expectancy, abandoning instrumental efforts.

Developmental Cognitive Adaptations

Adapting Rotter’s framework to preschoolers required Nowicki and Duke to account for the cognitive architectures defined by Piaget’s preoperational stage (approx. ages 2 to 7). Children within this developmental epoch routinely engage in animism, phenomenalism, and magical thinking. They often conflate correlation with causation and struggle to decouple their subjective internal desires from objective physical reality. Nowicki and Duke recognized that questions assessing luck, wishing, and parental authority must directly mirror the natural vernacular and cognitive schema of the preoperational-to-concrete operational transition. The scale captures this emerging transition from magical, externally determined thinking toward logical, cause-and-effect reasoning.

Integration with Self-Efficacy and Attribution Theory

While often conflated, locus of control in the PPNSIE must be distinguished from Bandura’s (1977) construct of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy pertains to an individual’s confidence in their ability to execute a specific task (e.g., “Can I run fast?”), whereas locus of control pertains to the perceived contingency between that task and its outcome (e.g., “Does running fast depend on my natural practice, or are kids just born that way?”). Furthermore, building on Fritz Heider’s and Bernard Weiner’s attribution models, the PPNSIE systematically taps into internal-stable (ability), internal-unstable (effort), external-stable (task difficulty/powerful others), and external-unstable (luck/chance) dimensions through child-friendly scenarios.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the PPNSIE has been empirically supported across five decades of developmental, educational, and clinical research. Psychometric evaluations focus on construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive criteria.

Construct and Developmental Validity

Theoretical tenets mandate that as children mature cognitively and accumulate social mastery experiences, their locus of control should show a developmental shift toward greater internality. Nowicki and Duke (1974) validated this hypothesis during the scale’s standardization across preschool, kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade cohorts. Mean external scores demonstrated a statistically significant, monotonic decline across age cohorts:

• Preschool children exhibited the highest mean external scores (indicating greater externality, typical of early dependence and magical ideation).
• First and second graders exhibited progressively lower external scores (indicating increasing internalization of behavioral contingencies, p < .001).

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity has been established by cross-referencing the PPNSIE with other developmental measures of attribution, competence, and behavioral adjustment:

• Stanford Preschool Internal-External Scale (SPIES): Mischel, Zeiss, and Zeiss (1974) documented significant positive correlations between internal scores on the PPNSIE and internal selections on the SPIES, confirming that both instruments tap shared attributional variance despite differing response modalities.
• Academic and Cognitive Persistence: Children scoring in the internal direction on the PPNSIE consistently exhibit significantly higher persistence on challenging tasks (such as unsolvable puzzle tasks, Block Design paradigms, and delay-of-gratification tests) compared to their externally scoring counterparts. Internally oriented children sustain instrumental focus, whereas externally oriented children terminate effort prematurely, seeking adult intervention or exhibiting passive off-task behavior.
• Academic Achievement: Longitudinal studies (e.g., Nowicki, Duke, & Connell; Shore, 1986) demonstrate that early internality measured via the PPNSIE in kindergarten reliably predicts superior reading readiness, standardized literacy scores, and mathematical competency in early elementary school, even after controlling for baseline socio-economic status.

Discriminant Validity

A critical requirement during the scale’s construction was ensuring that the PPNSIE does not merely represent a proxy for general cognitive ability or verbal intelligence:

• Nowicki and Duke (1974) evaluated correlations between PPNSIE scores and receptive vocabulary assessed via the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) as well as performance on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. Obtained correlations were uniformly non-significant or weak (typically ranging between r = -.06 and r = -.16), demonstrating that internal-external expectancies are functionally distinct from general intellectual endowment.
• Discriminant validity against pure acquiescence was substantiated through the lack of significant correlation between the 26 locus of control items and the 8 social desirability buffer items among normative non-clinical samples.

Reliability

Evaluating psychometric reliability in preschool- and primary-aged children presents unique challenges due to developmental flux, fluctuating attention spans, and fatigue. Despite these constraints, the PPNSIE exhibits robust reliability metrics for an early childhood questionnaire.

Internal Consistency

Because the PPNSIE employs a dichotomous (binary) response scale, internal consistency has historically been calculated via split-half reliability and the Kuder-Richardson Formula 20 (KR-20):

• In the original validation study by Nowicki and Duke (1974), the split-half reliability coefficient, corrected via the Spearman-Brown prophecy formula, was .79 for primary-grade samples and .68 for preschool cohorts.
• Subsequent independent empirical investigations (e.g., Stollard, 2011; Nunn, 1988) have reported KR-20 and Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging between .61 and .74. While slightly lower than adult psychometric instruments, these values are considered solid and methodologically acceptable within the developmental measurement literature for children under eight years of age, reflecting the heterogeneity of the early childhood attributional construct.

Test-Retest Stability

Temporal stability is a vital indicator that the scale captures stable generalized expectancies rather than transient affective states:

• Nowicki and Duke (1974) established test-retest reliability across a six-week interval, obtaining a stability coefficient of r = .79 (p < .001) for second-grade students and r = .71 for first-grade students.
• For younger preschool children (ages 4 to 5), six-to-seven-week test-retest coefficients typically range between .55 and .66, reflecting the heightened neurodevelopmental, linguistic, and environmental plasticity characteristic of early preschool maturation.

Factor Analysis

Extensive factor-analytic evaluations of the PPNSIE have confirmed both its overarching unidimensionality as a generalized expectancy instrument and the existence of meaningful multidimensional sub-factors reflecting specific domains of early childhood functioning.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Early exploratory factor analyses conducted by Nowicki and Duke, as well as subsequent analyses using principal axis factoring with varimax and oblimin rotations, identified a dominant first general factor accounting for the largest proportion of total common variance. This primary dimension reflects Generalized Personal Agency vs. Helplessness, capturing the child’s basic perception of whether self-generated action alters reality.

Beyond this overarching factor, secondary sub-factors regularly emerge across factor extractions:

• Interpersonal/Peer Control: Encompassing items related to peer relationships, friendship formation, and conflict de-escalation (e.g., Item 8: stopping a peer from hitting; Item 9: getting friends to do what one wants; Item 34: making other kids like you).
• Superstition, Luck, and Magic: Tapping preoperational beliefs in external magical causality (e.g., Item 3: good luck charms; Item 7: wishing making good things happen; Item 10: lucky numbers; Item 28: smart vs. lucky).
• Parental and Authority Control: Reflecting the child’s autonomy versus subordination relative to mother and father figures (e.g., Item 11: getting parents to do what the child wants; Item 22: whether parents should decide everything).
• Instrumental and Physical Competence: Relating to bodily efficacy, athletics, and health contingencies (e.g., Item 1: preventing colds; Item 20: being born good at running races; Item 23: difficulty winning games due to inherent peer superiority).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Modern psychometric investigations employing Confirmatory Factor Analysis with robust weighted least squares estimators (WLSMV) for categorical binary indicators have modeled both single-factor and hierarchical bifactor representations. While a strict, single-factor model often yields moderate fit indices (due to the presence of domain-specific variance across peer vs. parental contexts), a bifactor model—featuring one broad general locus of control dimension alongside specific peer, parental, and superstitious group factors—demonstrates superior fit indices (CFI > .92, TLI > .90, RMSEA < .05). These structural equation models support the theoretical proposition that early locus of control operates simultaneously as a unified overarching personality orientation and as a set of context-dependent attributional sub-domains.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The structured operational details of the PPNSIE are outlined below:

• Instrument Name: Nowicki Preschool and Primary Internal-External Control Scale (PPNSIE)
• Authors: Stephen Nowicki, Jr., Ph.D., and Marshall P. Duke, Ph.D. (1974)
• Target Population: Children aged 4 to 8 years (Preschool, Kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2)
• Administration Format: Individual, structured, one-on-one oral interview administered by a trained clinician, psychologist, or psychometrician. Items are read aloud to the child to eliminate reading literacy requirements.
• Total Item Count: 34 items
  • Locus of Control Items: 26 items
  • Filler / Social Desirability (Lie) Items: 8 items (Items 13, 15, 18, 19, 24, 29, 31, and 33)
• Response Modality: Forced-choice dichotomous format: Yes or No. (In standardized preschool testing, examiners may use neutral visual aids, such as nodding/shaking puppet figures or two distinct colored response cards labeled “YES” and “NO”, to facilitate comprehension without biasing response selection).
• Administration Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes per child.
• Scoring Protocol:
  • The primary score derived from the PPNSIE is the Total External Score.
  • One point (1) is assigned for each external response across the 26 locus of control items; zero points (0) are assigned for internal responses.
  • Total scores range from 0 to 26. Higher total scores denote a more external locus of control; lower scores denote a more internal locus of control.
  • The 8 social desirability buffer items are scored independently to evaluate acquiescence, defensiveness, or atypical response sets, and are not added into the 26-item locus of control total score.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Nowicki Preschool and Primary Internal-External Control Scale was formally developed and published in 1974 in Developmental Psychology (American Psychological Association). In alignment with the academic open-science traditions fostered by Dr. Stephen Nowicki and Dr. Marshall Duke, the instrument was placed in the public domain for non-commercial educational, clinical, and scholarly research applications. Researchers and licensed clinicians are generally permitted to reproduce, administer, and adapt the scale without paying royalty fees, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution and citation of the seminal Nowicki and Duke (1974) publication are maintained. For commercial software integrations, test compilation batteries, or institutional diagnostic dissemination, permissions should be coordinated through the authors or Emory University’s Department of Psychology.

References

• Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.2.191
• Bialer, I. (1961). Conceptualization of success and failure in mentally retarded and normal children. Journal of Personality, 29(3), 303–320. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1961.tb01662.x
• Crandall, V. C., Katkovsky, W., & Crandall, V. J. (1965). Children’s beliefs in their own control of reinforcements in intellectual-academic achievement situations. Child Development, 36(1), 91–109. https://doi.org/10.2307/1126620
• Mischel, W., Zeiss, R., & Zeiss, A. (1974). Internal-external control and persistence: Validation and implications of the Stanford Preschool Internal-External Scale. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 29(2), 265–278. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0036020
• Nowicki, S., & Duke, M. P. (1974). A preschool and primary internal-external control scale. Developmental Psychology, 10(6), 874–880. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0037255
• Nowicki, S., & Strickland, B. R. (1973). A locus of control scale for children. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 40(1), 148–154. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0033978
• Nunn, G. D. (1988). Concurrent validity of the Nowicki-Strickland Locus of Control Scale with early elementary school children. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 48(4), 1087–1091. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013164488484024
• Rotter, J. B. (1954). Social learning and clinical psychology. Prentice-Hall. https://doi.org/10.1037/10788-000
• Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80(1), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0092976
• Shore, R. J. (1986). Normative and predictive characteristics of the Nowicki-Duke Locus of Control Scales for children. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Emory University.
• Stollard, Y. (2011). Investigating locus of control and psychological outcomes in children (Doctoral dissertation, University of Worcester). http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/1431/

Items of the Scale