The Development of a Test of Earth Science Inquiry Skills for High School Student

고등학생의 지구과학 탐구능력 측정을 위한 평가도구 개발

Since the late of 1960,s, the improvement of science inquiry skills has been one of the most important goals in secondary science education. To achieve this goal, it is essential to develop a valid and reliable instrument for evaluating science inquiry skills. The purpose of this study is to develop a valid and reliable instrument for evaluating science inquiry skills for high school students. The instrument is developed through R & D procedure, which includes two field trials of the instrument. This study has formed a clear definition of the elements of science inquiry skills (formulating a hypothesis, controlling variables, designing an experiment, numeric calculation, graphing experimental data, inference, determining relationship, determining causalities, predicting experimental results , drawing a conclusion, formulating a generalization or model), and established the goals of assessment and developed the items of assessment. The instrument, Test of Earth Science Inquiry Skills, consists of 33 items which measure 11 science inquiry skills. There are content-free items for each science inquiry skills. This study has selected 11 science inquiry skills which are considered appropriate for being evaluated by paper-and-pencil test with SIEI (Hur,1984). The content validity of items, objectivity of the scoring keys and clarity of the items were checked by six experienced specialists in science education. At the same time, the two field trials has been executed and produced the reliability of the instrument, item difficulty index, and the effectiveness of distracters. The first field trial was performed using a sample of 304 high school students, and the second one using a sample of 872 high school students. Because the content validity is 84 % and the reliability (K-R 20) is 0.84, the developed instrument in this study is considered valid and reliable. The difficulty index is 49.4 %, answer ratio 59.1 %, the discrimination index 0.47 and the effectiveness of distracters evenly distributed, which also suffice the criteria of good instrument. The developed instrument in this study can diagnosis the well-developed science inquiry skills and the ill-developed science inquiry skills of the students, and trace the degree of the improvement of science inquiry skills.