Development of Assessment Indices for Proactive Attitude to Learning in Lower Secondary School Science

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to develop assessment indices to gauge the level of students’ proactive attitude to learning in science classes in lower secondary school. For this assessment, it is necessary to consider the “attitude of persistence” and the “attitude of self-regulation”. In this study, we attempted to create scales that could be used as assessment indices. Three lower secondary school teachers were surveyed about the aforementioned two aspects and the results were collected. Next, a questionnaire survey was administered to 397 lower secondary school students. As a result of subsequent exploratory factor analysis, 22 elements of the persistence scale and 29 components of the self-regulation scale were created. The correlation coefficients between the scores on these scales and the academic performance of the students in science class were calculated to determine the external validity of the scales, and significant positive correlations were found between the scores and the students’ academic performance in science.