Development of questionnaire instrument to assess students’ transformative competencies in science learning

Abstract

According to the OECD Education 2030 project, students in every country need to be ready as agents of change in the future. Three transformative competencies (Creating New Value, Reconciling Tensions and Dilemmas, Taking Responsibility) which are expected to develop students’ awareness, responsibility and innovation are used as focus of this study. A descriptive research for developing a valid and reliable questionnaire to assess the transformative competencies was conducted to investigate these competencies of junior high school students in Indonesia. It consists of 39 statements with a 5 Likert scale representing each transformative competency. A total of 445 students from 10 schools representing five provinces participated which consisted of students from 7th grade (222), 8th grade (91), and 9th grade (132) with the proportion of male (174) and female (271) students. The questionnaire was distributed on-line in sequence. The analysis results in that the questionnaire has a high reliability index of 0.96 for Cronbach’s Alpha (IBM SPSS Statistics 25), 0.94 for Person Reliability and 0.97 for Item Reliability (Winsteps Rasch Model) and good validity index for all items in the questionnaire, because the calculated r value is greater than the r table value. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). In general, students’ responses are on a “fairly typical of me” scale, except for TC4 statement “I can offer new solutions when there are problems while studying science”, which is “not very typical of me”. These results provide opportunities for further study to increase student creativity in science learning.