Validation of an adapted instrument to measure students’ attitude towards science

By using Rasch model, the findings of this study showed that the adapted ATST demonstrates sufficient evidences of psychometric properties. Thus, it has the potential to be a diagnostic tool in assessing students’ ATS in the future.

Implications of the Study

This section would discuss the practical implication after the findings discovered. The findings of this study have a number of important implications for future practice. First, in this study, the adapted ATS measure, ATST demonstrated sufficient evidence of psychometric properties in the context of Malaysia. It has the potential to be used to retrieve Malaysian secondary school students’ ATS validly. However, the purpose of the ATST used in this study is not for selection purpose, especially for high-stake test purpose. Without denying the importance of cognitive aspect in tracking, this study intends to put ATST in the position of diagnostic test to retrive students’ ATS but not a selective test to determine a student’s stream. It can be a useful tool for schools and teachers in gaining valuable information. They might use the ATST to investigate the level of ATS of their students and pinpoint attributes that contribute to the decreasing of students’ ATS. In turn, elevate students’ ATS and improve their science achievement.

Besides, although ATS is not new in science education, there is a lack of clarification about what is being measured. In this study, an ATS framework was articulated based on theories and previous study. Findings of this study showed that there are strong correlation between the eight ATS constructs, supporting the relevancy and accuracy of the framework. Hence, this framework has the potential to serve to advance the knowledge of ATS and provide a framework for ATS research in the future.

Future Study

This research has thrown up many questions in need of further investigation. First, due to the time constraint, various aspects of psychometric properties of the ATST used in this study were examined, except the predictive validity, worth for future investigation. Besides, the researcher did not investigate the problematic items in further, such as misfit item as this is beyond the scope of the present study. Therefore, further investigation into misfit items to enhance the psychometric properties of ATST is recommended.

On the other hand, some extraneous variables that could have influenced the result might have been excluded in this study. They might be socio economic status, family background, culture, mother tongue, and type of school. Since Malaysia is a country which is rich in different cultures and languages, it would be interesting to assess the effect of various demographic factors in future research to get more precise and representative results.

In addition, result of this study might not represent the whole country of Malaysia. As this research was carried out in the state of Penang, Malaysia, generalization of the findings on other states is limited. More information on different states in Malaysia would help us to establish a greater degree of accuracy on this matter and make comparison study possible.