Background:

A high academic workload may have adverse consequences among university students.

Aim:

To design and validate an instrument to measure both real and perceived academic workload for health care students.

Material and Methods:

The questionnaire was designed based on a bibliographic revision and the conduction of two focus groups conformed by undergraduate students from a Faculty of Medicine. Afterwards, it was submitted to qualitative pre-tests. The final instrument consists of a self-applied questionnaire with both a characterization section (10 questions) and one concerning academic workload by subject and semester (five and two questions, respectively). A national and international panel of 14 experts evaluated the survey content's validity. The analysis was performed according to the Content Validity Ratio and the Content Validity Index.

Results:

The complete instrument was validated with an 84% consensus between the judges. Each section of the instrument was approved separately with a 77% and a 94% agreement, respectively. After being individually analyzed by the judges, each question was validated. The wording of questions was improved taking the experts comments into consideration.

Conclusions:

The proposed instrument constitutes a contribution for the measurement of real and perceived academic workload for students.