A Scale for Measuring Attitude toward Physical Education in the Elementary School

Abstract

A scale measuring attitude toward physical education was developed for use with elementary school children in grades 4 to 7. Many of the statements used in the construction of the scale were obtained from the children themselves; children of the same age group assessed the degree of favorableness or unfavorableness of the 100 statements before the final selection of items was made to form the scale. Validation and reliability studies were done for boys and girls separately and for combined sexes on the 29-item scale. Correlation between scores obtained on the scale and a self-rating produced coefficients ranging from .22 to .82. No consistent differences between sexes were found. When pre-and posttest means for 669 children were correlated to determine the reliability, coefficients ranged from .57 to .68 when the analysis was done separately by schools, and from .63 to .81 when the analysis was done by grade. Again, no significant difference was found between sexes. In general, the correlations increased from the lowest to the highest grade. All reliability correlations were significant at the .001 level of confidence.