Development of an Attitude Scale for Physics Courses and a Review of Student Attitudes

Abstract

The aim of present research was to develop a Likert type scale that determines the attitudes of 9th grade students towards physics courses so as to identify the physics students’ attitudes towards this course. The research started with a draft scale of 30 items. The draft scale was applied to 177 ninth grade students as a pilot research. According to results obtained from factor analysis, a scale that has 21 items and covering six sub-sets was developed. KMO value of the scale was .82; the Bartlett’s test value was 1997.3; and the internal consistency coefficient (Cronbach’s alpha) was .90. The scale was then applied to 460 ninth grade students from different schools to conduct a confirmatory factor analysis. It was found that the types of upper-secondary school influence students’ attitudes towards physics courses while gender and educational level of the parents had no significant influence on these attitudes. Therefore, it was also found that the students had an ambivalent attitude towards physics courses. Keywords: factor analysis, physics course, scale development, student attitude.

Attitudes and beliefs toward physics: A mini review

“…The findings show that students' attitudes and beliefs about physics are influenced by differences in gender and personality [18,27], class level [11,28], type of school [9], and age [14,31]. Several findings state that male students have higher attitudes and beliefs than female students.…”

“…22 [28] The respondents of this study were From this research it was found that the type of high school 460 students of class IX SMA affects attitudes towards physics subjects. Meanwhile, gender in downtown Nizip, Gaziantep and parental education level did not have a significant effect on province.…”

Recorded Video Versus Narrated Animation in Teaching Physics Problem-Solving: The Influence of Problem Difficulty Level

“…Numerous tools exist for measuring physics learning. These predominantly focus on conceptual understanding and attitudes towards the subject (Brundage & Singh, 2023;Gürler & Baykara, 2020;Hestenes et al, 1992;Marake et al, 2022;Maloney et al, 2001). However, specialised instruments for measuring complex physics problem-solving abilities are less common (Adams, 2015).…”