Measuring Attitudes Toward Science

Abstract

Leaders in science education (7) stress the importance of concepts, generalizations, scientific methods, and attitudes. Great stress is placed upon the attitudes and modes of reasoning which lead to the organization and applications of new learnings. In order to identify scientific talent and to direct the learning of science by the talented, teaching and testing must involve a wide range of objectives. While some progress has been made in the measurement of student development of scientific concepts (2, 5, 8) and the learning of critical thinking (1, 6), the objective measurement of attitudes toward science as an academic discipline has been meager.The term "attitude" used in this paper refers to how an individual feels about elementary school science an emotionalized feeling for or against science. A distinction needs to be made between this type of attitude and the term scientific attitude or scientifically minded person who possesses an open-mind, looks at a problem from many sides, and seeks reliable sources for his evidence.

The Attitude of Pre‐Service Elementary Teachers Toward Science1

“…(See Table II Variable 2). 3. The mean score of the 112 respondents experiencing organized science instruction was 73.35; the mean score of the 90 respondents experiencing an incidental scienc curriculum in the elementary school was 69.34.…”

Development of an Affective Instrument for Measuring High School Science Students' Behaviors

“…A small "Q" suggests good agreement among judges and a good measurable item for the scale. 3 Items with a "Q" value greater than 3.5 were removed from the instrument. A total of twenty-one items were removed using this statistic.…”

“…In summary, statements for the instrument were selected according to (1) an equal number of favorable and unfavorable items, (2) statements that have a "Q" value of 3.5 or less, (3) items that have a probability value less than .05 (using the T'-test), (4) an equal representation of all eleven subcategories of the continuum, and (5) distribution of the scale values for the instrument from the lowest scale values (about 1.2) to the highest scale values (about 9.9). After the different discriminatory techniques were applied to the one hundred and ten items fifty-two items remained for the final ADMS.…”

“Development of an Attitude Measuring Instrument for Science Education”

“…The strength of consistency was reported by percentages based upon consensus of the judges. For example, on the Word Association Test for the theme science, two students had identical responses between their pre-and post-tests, 16 showed identical responses in 2 of their 3 responses, 6 replaced pre-test words with synonyms, 6 substituted word variants, 9 showed consistency in thought: Thus the judges found a definite consistency between pre-and posttests in 97.5% of the students. A similar analysis was made for other tests and other themes.…”