The development of scale of educational attitudes

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation was to develop the Scale of Educational Attitudes (SEA). Theoretically, students' attitudes towards education can be separated into four categories: Academically Disinterested, Occupation-Driven, Pure Scholar, and Profession-Driven Scholar. The SEA can determine which attitude a student has towards school based on his/her responses to the Learning Orientation & Motivation and Future Goals Achievement subscales of the SEA. This instrument was developed in four phases. In the first phase, the items of the SEA were written based on the literature. In the second phase, a factor analysis was conducted to eliminate weak items and to identify underlying constructs of the scale. The third phase consisted of another factor analysis as well as the validation of the scale with other established scales. The final phase tested the temporal stability of the SEA using test-retest data. The resulting scale contains eighteen items that measure learning orientation and motivation as well as fifteen items that measure future goals achievement.