Investigation of Middle School Students’ Attitudes Towards Social Studies: A Study Of Developing A Scale

Abstract

The aim of this study is to develop an attitude scale to determine primary education (grades 5,6 and 7) students’ attitudes towards Social Studies Course. A total of 1127 students from three different middle schools in the city of Hatay, Turkey 556 students of the sample are 556 females and 571 males. 384 of them goes to 5th grade, 399 to 6th grade and 344 to 7th grade. In the process of development of Attitude Scale towards Social Studies course, literature review was performed firstly. Then an item pool of 63 items was created and the number of items was reduced to 40 in the direction of expert opinions and a 5-point Likert-type draft scale was created. Draft scale was applied to 3 students who are outside study group the points which were not understood were arranged and the final form was applied to the students. As a result of the factor analysis carried out in order to ensure construct validity of the scale, it was seen that the scale consists of 4 factors. After factor analysis, Cronbach Alpha coefficient was calculated to be 0.92 to ensure the reliability of the scale with 29 items. The analyses carried out showed that the developed scale is valid and reliable.

Keywords

• Anahtar kelimeler: Sosyal Bilgiler, Tutum ölçeği, Geçerlik, Güvenirlik