Development and Validation of Questionnaire for Physics Learning Self-Efficacy among Ghanaian Senior High Schools

Abstract

This study focused on developing an instrument for assessing Senior High School students Physics learning self-efficacy beliefs. An instrument known as PLSE was administered on-site and in-person. The PLSE was tested on 290 final year Senior High School Physics students. Prior to this, the initial scale was administered to 60 Senior High School Physics students after validation by seven experts of Science educators. The PCA extracted four factors with loadings ranging from 0.588 to 0.889. The four factors were Physics Practical, Every Application of concepts, High-Order Thinking Skills and Physics Content. The calculated Average Variance Extracted (AVE), and Composite Reliability of the PLSE items were also found to range from 0.540 to 0.718 and 0.823 to 0.927 respectively. The subsequent reliability results showed excellent internal reliability for each of the sub-scales with Corrected Item-total Correlation (CIC) values, ranging between 0.571 and 0.752. Validity, and reliability assessments revealed accepted threshold cut-off of Average Variance Extracted (AVE), Composite Reliability (CR,) and Cronbach's Alpha coefficient. This paper suggests that the current proposed Physics learning instrument represent a reliable research scale to measure Senior High students Physics learning self-efficacy belief.