Development and Validation of a Self-concept and Attitude Scale for Senior Secondary School Students in Nigeria

Abstract

This study developed and validated a scale for measuring self-concept and attitude of secondary school students in Nigeria. The scale is a self-descriptive or self-report type of scale which was developed for the purpose of measuring students’ self-concept and attitude toward mathematics at the senior secondary school level. The construction of the scale was done considering the generally accepted principles and procedures for scale development. At the initial stage of the development, a pool of 300 items was generated and after sorting them out and subjecting them to experts’ judgment, 60 items emerged. The items were then administered on the sampled students from the population. The students’ response scores were then subjected to item–total correlation analysis, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy and Bartlett’s test for cohesion of items. The items were also subjected to item – total analysis, intercorrelation analysis and factor analysis. At the end of all these processes, a 45-item finally emerged for the scale. The population of the study comprised all the Public and Private secondary school students in Northeast Nigeria. A sample of 960 students was obtained from 32 secondary schools from four of the six states of Northeast Nigeria using Multistage sampling techniques. Factor analysis confirmed the validity of the scale which includes the content and construct validity. The reliability of the scale was determined using Cronbach alpha with a high coefficient of 0.937. The instrument used for the study was the developed and validated scale titled “Mathematics Self-Concept and Attitude Scale (MSCAS)” designed in Likert’s type. The students’ response scores were analyzed and the hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The result of the findings indicated that the instrument has valid psychometric properties; it is reliable, workable and is neither gender nor location biased. It was therefore recommended that the instrument be used for measuring secondary school students’ mathematics Self-concept and attitude in Nigeria.