VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY ANALYSES FOR THE NATURE OF SCIENCE INSTRUMENT SECONDARY (NOSI-S)

This research aims to adapt The Nature of Science Instrument Elementary Scale (NOSI-E) developed by Peoples (2012) into Turkish for secondary school students and to analyse the psychometric properties of the scale setting out from the fact that it is a necessity of science education aimed to achieve for students/prospective teachers to have adequate understanding of the nature of science. The validity analyses for the scale were performed with Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Cronbach alpha (α) coefficients were calculated for reliability. Following CFA, it was taken for granted that the fit indices for the model met the goodness of fit criterion. On examining the fit indices, the scale was regarded to attain construct validity due to the fact that the χ2/df ratio (1.42) was below 3, that the RMSEA value was at the level of .04 and that the NNFI and CFI (>.90) values were at acceptable levels. On the other hand, α coefficients, which were the internal consistency coefficients calculated for the reliability analysis of the scale, were found to range between .631 and .775, and for the overall scale was calculated as .814. These reliability index values were considered to be at acceptable levels.