Development of an Instrument for Measuring Affective Factors Regarding Conceptual Understanding in High School Physics

Among many remedial approaches against the increasing unfavorableness toward school science, one of the prevalent findings studied by affective experts is that students' achievement in science and their attitude toward it has a relatively weak relationship. In contrast, cognitive experts assert that the conceptual change involves more than cognitive aspects, and may be influenced by affective factors such as beliefs, motivation, learning attitudes, and sociocultural contexts. The latter regards continuous conceptual change as leading to better student understanding of science with variables of students' attitude toward science. As an initial step toward illuminating the affective-cognitive learning aspects of science, the purpose of this study is to develop an instrument for analyzing the relationship between students' conceptual understanding and affective factors. Cognitive questionnaires from the database of distribution in students' misconceptions of physics (DMP project), and affective questionnaires from the Relevance of Science Education (ROSE project) are integrated into our instrument. The respondents are high school students in Okayama prefecture, Japan. Through the pilot test, the authors integrated attitude toward science (AS) and interest inventory (II) from ROSE into cognitive understanding (CD) from DMP. Statistical methodologies such as factor analysis and item total correlation theoretically discerned the effective sixty-three items from the two original item pools. Having discussed two validity issues, the authors suggest ongoing research associated with our affective-cognitive research perspective.