DEVELOPMENT OF AN ATTITUDE SCALE FOR PHYSICS COURSES AND A REVIEW OF STUDENT ATTITUDES

The aim of present research was to develop a Likert type scale that determines the attitudes of 9th grade students towards physics courses so as to identify the physics students' attitudes towards this course. The research started with a draft scale of 30 items. The draft scale was applied to 177 ninth grade students as a pilot research. According to results obtained from factor analysis, a scale that has 21 items and covering six sub-sets was developed. KMO value of the scale was .82; the Bartlett's test value was 1997.3; and the internal consistency coefficient (Cronbach's alpha) was .90. The scale was then applied to 460 ninth grade students from different schools to conduct a confirmatory factor analysis. It was found that the types of upper-secondary school influence students' attitudes towards physics courses while gender and educational level of the parents had no significant influence on these attitudes. Therefore, it was also found that the students had an ambivalent attitude towards physics courses.