Development of semantic differential scale for measurement of students‟ interest in agricultural science

Abstract

The study was designed to meet the need for a reliable and valid instrument for measurement of Senior School Students’ Interest in Agricultural Science. Using stratified random sampling, 13 (out of 45) Senior Schools were selected from Federal, Model and Public Senior Secondary Schools in Owerri and Ahiazu Local Government Areas of Imo State and Umuahia North and South Local Government Areas of Abia State. One stream of Senior School One (SS1) Students was selected in each of the 13 sampled schools. Thus, the sample comprised of 407 students made up of 132 males and 269 females. Development of the scales passed through six identifiable stages, namely: (1) Identification of salient individual dimensions of the concept, “Agricultural Science Interests” (2) Writing a pool of initial items, their face-validation and editing based on the results of trial-testing and comments from Test, Measurement and Evaluation Experts. (3) Preliminary trail-testing of the instrument. (4) Final administration of the instrument on the study sample (5) Estimation of psychometric properties of the Scale. (6) Provision of guidelines for effective utilization of the Agricultural Science Interest Scales. It was found (1) that all the 11 subscales in the instrument are appropriate for measurement of students’ interests in Agricultural. (2) that 10 out of 11bipolar adjectives in the initial scale which exhibited Discrimination Indices of 0.4 and above are the best for measurement of students’ interests in Agriculture. It was recommended that Teachers, Science Educators, Extension Agents, Guidance Counsellors and Researchers make effective use of the instrument for monitoring of young peoples’ interests in Agricultural Science as a valuable basis for planning intervention programmes that will bring about sustainable agricultural development in the Tropics. The use of this instrument, provided by this research, should be preferred to the usual subjective assessment of the affective domain outcomes in most Nigerian Schools.