Developing and Validating an Instrument to Measure Students’ Experiences in a Further Mathematics Classroom

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to develop an instrument for measuring students’ perception of teaching and learning variables in a Further Mathematics classroom with high psychometric properties of internal-consistency reliability and construct validity. A survey research design was used involving 318 students randomly selected from senior high schools. Enhancing Teaching and Learning Questionnaire (ETLQ) was used to solicit students’ responses on the issues they experienced during lessons for Further Mathematics. Principal component factor analysis with Promax as an oblique rotation and using a factor loading of 0.40 as a cut-off was further conducted on the data to record a more accurate representation of the relationship among the factors to establish the construct validity and the internal reliability of the instrument. The 26 items resulted in a four-factor solution produced based on the parallel analysis. The four factors together accounted for a total of 54.543% of the variance. The Cronbach’s alpha of the reduced 26 items is equal to 0.806. The subscales had acceptable internal consistency, as Cronbach’s alpha ranges from 0.696-0.893. The study reliability coefficient is high. The instrument will be useful for mathematics educators and researchers in Ghana and the world at large for measuring students’ perceptions of teaching and learning variables in a classroom. And the study recommends this instrument for use to measure the experiences of senior high school students in the classrooms. Keywords – Validation, Learning experiences, Teaching, Further Mathematics, Senior High School