Development and Application of Tool for Measuring High School Students' Scientific Experience

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to develop a measurement tool quantifying the degree of high school students' scientific experience. Based on previous studies, we divided the factors that compose school scientific experience into three categories: general activity experience, scientific inquiry experience and laboratory apparatus experience. While, outside of school scientific experience was divided into general activity experience, interesting activity experience and field trip experience. Items consisting each factor were selected from scientific experience measurement tools used in previous researches, most frequent answers showed in open questionnaire about scientific experiences, and exploratory analysis of textbooks. After the measurement tool developed by pilot-questionnaires and previous researches were preliminary tested and then was secondarily tested for a group of 413 high school students. The content validity and construct validity of the measurement tool was evaluated by two school teachers and two experts in science education and by factor analysis, respectively. The reliability of the tool was estimated with Cronbach Alpha. The results of validity and reliability revealed that the tool was appropriate for measuring scientific experience.