Assessing Student Attitudes

Importance of student Attitude

All learning has affective components. Whenever a student masters knowledge or skills, she or he develops an attitude toward subject area and the processes of learning. Because student’s attitudes influence future behavior, the development of positive attitudes may be more important than mastery of specific knowledge and skills.

The overall purpose of schools is to develop each student to maximum capacity as a productive and happy member of society. An important measure of success is not the degree to which student’s master knowledge and skills, but whether the students voluntarily use such knowledge and skills in their daily life outside of school and in their lives after they have finished school.  

Besides positive attitudes toward subject areas and skills such as reading, writing, and math, schools are supposed to inculcate positive attitude toward:

1)      self

2)      diverse Others

3)      potential careers

4)      being role responsible and role readiness 

The most important of all, schools are supposed to ensure students develop positive attitudes toward our pluralistic, democratic society, freedom of choice, equality of opportunity, self-reliance, and free and open inquiry into all issues

An attitude is a positive or negative reaction to a person, object, or idea. It is a learned predisposition to respond in favorable or unfavorable manner to a particular person, object or idea. Attitude is important determinants of behavior.

A teacher, school, or school system can asses student attitudes through observational procedures, interviews, and questionnaires.  

In planning how to use questionnaires to measure student attitude, you may use the following procedure:

•          Decide on which attitudes to measure

•   Construct a questionnaires by writing specific questions to measure the targeted attitudes

•          Select the standardized attitude measures you want to use, if any

•    Give your questionnaire near the beginning and then near the end of an instructional unit, semester, or year

•   Analyze and organize the data for feedback to interested stakeholders to make instructional decision

•      Give the feedback in a timely and orderly way and facilitate stakeholders’ use of the data

•    Use the data on student attitudes to modify and improve the course and your teaching

Deciding Which Attitudes to Measure

Which attitudes you want to measure depends on your instructional goals and the subject you teach. Minimally, however, you may want to measure attitudes toward the subject area, the instructional method used, and learning in general.

Constructing Your Own Questionnaire

In preparing your own questionnaire, there are three types of questions can be used, they are:

1.       Open-Ended Question

2.       Closed-Ended Question

3.       Semantic Differential Question

Open-Ended Question

Open-Ended Questions call for the student to answer by writing a statement that may vary in length. They may require respondents to give a free response or supply a word or phrase to fill in the blank.

Example of open-ended questions follows:

•          My General opinion about Mathematics is …………………………….

•          My teachers are …………………………

•          If someone suggested I take up American history as my life’s work, I would reply, ……………………..

•          Mathematics is my …………………………………….. subject.

Open-ended questions are a good way to obtain new ideas about what to ask to measure student attitude and values.  Student responses are scored by counting the number of times a word or phrase occurs. A mean and standard deviation may then be calculated. Open-ended questions, however, tend to be hard to analyze and often are not fully answered.

Closed-Ended Question

Closed-ended questions require the student to indicate the alternative answer closest to his or her internal response. The response they require can be dichotomous, multiple choice, ranking, or scale. Here are some examples.

·         Do you intend to take another course in Mathematics ……… Yes …….. No

·         Circle each of the words that tell how you feel about Mathematics:

        Interesting                      very important               worthless           

        Boring                            difficult                        useful  

·         Rank these subject areas from most interesting (1) to least interesting (6) to you :

        Social Studies                                     English

        Science                                                 Mathematics

        Physical Education                           Foreign Language

·         How interested are you in learning more about Mathematics?

        Very uninterested       1   2   3   4   5   6   7       Very Interested

The questions are scored by counting the frequencies of each response and then calculating the mean response and the standard deviation

Semantic Differential Question

This type of question allows the teacher to present any object (be it person, issue, practice, subject area, or anything else) and obtain an indication of student attitude toward it. It’s consist of a series of rating scales of bipolar adjectives pairs describing a concept the teacher wants to obtain student attitudes toward. An example is:

POETRY

Ugly                          1   2   3   4   5   6   7           Beautiful

Bad                          1   2   3   4   5   6   7           Good

Worthless                  1   2   3   4   5   6   7           Valuable

Negative                   1   2   3   4   5   6   7           Positive

How good is your question?

Writing good open-ended and closed-ended questions takes some expertise and practice. To evaluate each question you should considering the following points:

1)      Is the question worded simply with no abbreviations and difficult word?

2)      Are all the words in the question familiar to the respondents?

3)      Is the question worded without slang spaces, colloquialisms, and bureaucratic words?

4)      Are any words emotionally loaded, vaguely defined, or overly general?

5)      Does the question have unstated assumptions or implications that lead respondents to give certain response?

6)      Does the question presuppose a certain state affairs?

7)      Does the question ask for only one bit of information?

8)      Is only one adjective or adverb used in the question?

9)      Does the wording of the question imply a desired answer?

10)   Do any words have a double meaning that may cause misunderstanding?

11)   Are the response options mutually exclusive and sufficient  to cover each conceivable answer?

12)   Does the question contain words that tend not to have a common meaning, such as significant, always, usually, most, never, and several?

Deciding on types of responses to questions?

There are two types of responses, they are:

ü  Open-ended responses

The types of open-ended responses fill in the blank and free responses.

ü  Close-ended

The types of closed-ended responses include dichotomous, multiple choice, ranking, or scale.

Deciding on types of responses to questions?

The following list of questions will help you to determine which type of response you want to elicit

1.       Is the question best asked as an open-ended or closed ended question?

2.       For open-ended questions, should respondents give a free response or fill in the blank?

3.       For closed-ended questions, should the response be dichotomous, multiple, choice, ranking, scale?

4.       If a multiple-choice or scale check response is used, does it (a)cover adequately all the significant alternatives without overlapping,(b)provide choices in a defensible order, and (c) provide response alternatives of uniform value(distance)

One of the most common approaches for writing closed-ended question with a scaled response is the Likert method of summated rating. The procedure for developing a Likert scale is to ask several questions about the topic of interest. For each question a response scale is given with anywhere from three to nine points. Questions with five alternatives are quite common. Two ways of presenting the alternatives follow.

Strongly disagree (1)                      Agree (4)

Disagree (2)                                        strongly agree (5)

Undecided (3)

Strongly disagree                1   2   3   4   5     strongly Agree

A student’s responses for all the questions are summed together to get an overall scale indicating the student’s attitudes toward the issue being measured.

To assess the quality of your questions against the following criteria. 

1.       Is the question necessary? The question may ask for information that is (a) already covered in another question or(b) more detailed that necessary

2.       Does the question cover too much material?

3.       Do respondents have the information necessary to answer the question?

4.       Does the question need to be more concrete, specific, and closely related to the respondent’s personal experience?

5.       Is the question content sufficiently general and free from spurious concreteness and specify?

6.       Is the question content biased or loaded in one direction without accompanying questions to balance the emphasis?

7.       Will the respondents give the information sought?