Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
1
Introduction
1.1 The Need for Attitude
Student attitude toward science is a concern in many countries. For various reasons,
such as public and disciplinary concerns about content knowledge and uncertain
reliability of measurement for the attitude construct, education accountability
policy usually does not consider a student
s attitude (The General Assembly of
the State of South Carolina,
1998
). Similarly, many countries are faced with the
pressure to make educational policies focus on content knowledge in order to catch
up with top-achieving countries as measured by the international assessments like
TIMSS (Martin et al.,
2008
). This has created a concern that some educators might
not perceive the affective domain as important and may pay more attention to
students
'
content knowledge than to their affective growth, which may impact
student learning in the long term. Because some also may perceive an attitude
score to be subjective and unreliable, effort should be taken to measure and
interpret data in a scientifically valid way.
When an attitude instrument is designed for international use, there is a validity
concern that the students of various cultural backgrounds may interpret the items
differently. The different interpretations of survey items can potentially bias the
survey results if users do not take this validity concern into account. In their review,
Osborne cited the studies by Taylor et al. (Modood,
1993
; Taylor,
1993
) and posited
that “Asian students have a clear preference to study for degrees in medicine-
related studies, engineering or mathematics
'
Afro-Caribbean students seem to
shy away from science preferring to pursue degrees in the social sciences,” while
“Japanese-Americans were most positively inclined towards scientific careers”
(Osborne, Simon, & Collins,
2003
). While these sorts of conclusions are intriguing,
without examining the instrument function across a number of populations, we
cannot be sure whether the observed difference is due to test bias or represents a real
difference in the group means (Jiang, Xu, Garcia, & Lewis,
2010
; Schroeder,
Murphy, & Holme,
2012
). Therefore, we need to gather sufficient evidence as to
whether or not the instrument functions similarly to measure the same construct
across different groups, so we can make a fair comparison using the instrument
scores.
In this pilot study an attitude instrument was given to a student sample in Saudi
Arabia, and compared to previous results from Australia and the USA (Xu & Lewis,
2011
; Xu, Southam, & Lewis,
2012
), to examine how an attitude instrument
functions in context and how college students
...
attitude status toward chemistry
might differ between each group. Saudi Arabian students are of particular interest in
the area of student attitude due to the unique features of the college chemistry
programs as compared to other western educational systems such as Australia or the
USA. For example, in Saudi Arabia, courses are mostly offered in classes segre-
gated by sex, even in coeducational universities. The major choice is also limited to
'
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