Developing a Holistic Measurement on Nuclear Issues for Preservice Science Teachers

Abstract

In this study, a conceptual understanding test and a knowledge test were developed to investigate the conceptual understanding and knowledge levels of pre-service science teachers about a socio-scientific topic, nuclear energy and nuclear plants. The study addresses the reliability and validity of these developed tests. While the 34-question knowledge test was administered to 441 pre-service science teachers, the 15-question conceptual understanding test was administered to 223 pre-service science teachers. In the test development process, to stablish the validity expert opinions were sought, item analyses and factor analyses were conducted and reliability computations were performed. At the end of the editing, after the correction and elimination of some problematic questions, the final form of the knowledge test emerged with 30 questions and the conceptual understanding test emerged with 13 questions. As a result of the analyses, it was found that the knowledge test consists of four factors and explains 56.98% of the total variance while the conceptual understanding test is made up of three factors and accounts for 46.35% of the total variance. Furthermore, the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of the conceptual understanding test was found to be 0.77 and KR-20 and two-tier reliability coefficients of the knowledge level test were calculated to be 0.86 and 0.85 respectively.