Investigation of the Exam Question Types Attitude Scale for Secondary School Students: Development, Validity, and Reliability

Abstract

Developing students' positive attitudes toward a situation is extremely important. Many attitude scales aim to measure students' general attitudes toward a situation, but there is a scarcity of tools that can be easily employed to determine the type of questions students prefer in an exam. This paper reports the development and testing of an instrument like this for secondary school students, and 781 secondary school students participated in this study. The Exam Question Types Attitude Scale (EQTA-S) consisting of 10 items was developed in this study, and its validity and reliability were analyzed. Exploratory factor analysis was performed for the construct validity of the EQTA-S and an EQTA-S consisting of 10 items was obtained. The result of the confirmatory factor analysis showed that the scale is a good fit for the proposed one-factor structure. Additionally, the reliability of the scale was established by acceptable Cronbach alpha values that indicated reliability coefficients (Cronbach's alpha) of .81, .85, .84, and .82, respectively. Therefore, the findings of the study revealed that secondary school students' attitude scale toward exam question types provides valid and reliable results. As a result, this scale can be used to measure students' attitudes towards five different types of exam questions.