Gathering Psychometric Evidence for ASCIv2 to Support Cross-Cultural Attitudinal Studies for College Chemistry Programs - Affective Dimensions in Chemistry Education - page 181

Table 2 CFA item loadings for the two-factor solution and item-total correlation within each
intended subscale
Factor Item # Item loading Item-total correlation

Intellectual accessibility Item 1 0.76 0.49

Item 2 0.80 0.60

Item 3 0.66 0.50

Item 6 0.11 (n.s.) 0.04

Emotional satisfaction Item 4 0.75 0.61

Item 5 0.71 0.63

Item 7 0.74 0.61

Item 8 0.52 0.45

Note : all loadings are significantly different from 0 at the α ¼ 0.05 level except those labeled (n.s.)

challenging) is negatively related to other items in that scale of intellectual acces-
sibility, and the correlation coefficient is not significantly different from zero. This
means that KU students did not consider item 6 as an indicator of this proposed
factor (intellectual accessibility), and the measurement of this scale should be
reconstructed. The other scale of emotional satisfaction works as intended. For
WU and SE data, all items are loaded on the intended subscale well. The item-total
correlation was examined with item 6 (challenging vs. not challenging) and found
to have an extremely low value of 0.1. Again the observation suggests that KU

responses to item 6 are not correlated to three other items (1, 2, and 3) for the
“intellectual accessibility” subscale. One possible reason is that KU students might
have a different understanding of this word pair of challenging/not challenging
from students at WU and SE.

4.3 Internal Consistency Reliability for ASCIv2

The internal consistencies were calculated for each subscale. Cronbach s alpha for

the KU data is only 0.56 for the intellectual accessibility scale, which is quite a bit
lower than the satisfactory level of 0.7. Cronbach

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s alpha increases to 0.78 if item

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6 is deleted from this scale. Cronbach s alpha for both subscales for WU and SE are

above the rule-of-thumb satisfactory level of 0.7.

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4.4 Students ' Interpretation of Item 6

Based on the CFA and Cronbach s alpha, KU students responded to item 6, chal-

lenging/not challenging, differently from their counterparts and were not consistent
with the intended internal structure. It is critical to examine the cognitive process of
how the respondents respond to the survey item, and the first task is to explore how

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