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Asia-Pacific Forum
on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 14, Issue 1, Article 7 (Jun., 2013) |
Developing a physics laboratory anxiety scale
Nilüfer Cerit BERBER
Necmettin Erbakan University, Ahmet Keleşoğlu Faculty of Education, Physics Education Department, Konya, TURKEY, 42090
E-mail: ncberber@konya.edu.tr
Received 30 Jan., 2013
Revised 21 Jun., 2013
Although the level of cognitive behaviours is continually controlled in school environments, affective behaviours cannot be both acquired and measured in a planned manner way. In fact, the functionality of educational activities, which are orientated towards cognitive targets, can be enhanced by placing more emphasis on the affective dimension. Physics especially is a subject which often attracts negative attitudes. Students possess negative attitudes towards the physics laboratory as much as towards physics lesson and physics exams. It is evident that this negative attitude is largely expressed as anxiety. Thus, this research has aimed at developing a scale that can be applied to determine anxieties related to the physics laboratory lessons of students from secondary schools and higher education institutions. Primarily, an item pool associated with laboratory anxiety was formed in the scale development process. This item pool was tested on 245 undergraduates in a physics laboratory lesson at Necmettin Erbakan University and exploratory factor analyses, confirmatory factor analyses and reliability analyses were performed. A scale with four sub-dimensions and 16 items subsequently emerged. Six items of the scale measure anxiety about finishing experiments; four items measure anxiety about doing the experiment correctly; three items measure constant anxiety about the physics laboratory; and three items measure anxiety related to the use of materials in the laboratory.
Keywords: physics laboratory, anxiety, physics anxiety, science anxiety, affective learning
