Developing a Scale to Measure Attitude towards Science Learning among School Students

Abstract

Attitude towards science has attracted lot of attentions from researchers in the past and is still widely researched. Consequently, a large number of tools are available for measuring attitude towards science covering different dimensions of attitude. The reported variation is usually attributed to uniqueness of socio-economic and cultural aspects of society. This argument provided basis for developing attitude towards science learning (AtSL) which should be contextually relevant. Moreover it seems that majority of the scales available are used by the researcher once in their research and not probably meant to be developed as standards scale. Therefore their psychometric properties are not reported. A questionnaire of 54 items was developed and data was collected from 464 students of five government schools, varying in district, gender and class. Exploratory Factor Analysis clustered items into four sub-factors. The positive, strong and significant correlation of each sub-factor with total AtSL showed that sub-factors contribute towards measurement of main construct while relatively weaker inter-factor correlation indicated mutual independence of each sub-factor. The scale reliability was α= 0.86, whereas range of α for sub-factors ranged between 0.75-0.61.