Turkish Adaptation of the Attitude Towards STEM Scale: A Validity and Reliability Study

The purpose of this study was to establish the validity and reliability of Turkish version of the Attitude towards STEM Scale developed by The Friday Institute for Educational Innovation (2012) for measuring middle school students’ attitudes towards STEM. The sample of the study consisted of 1323 middle school students (6th, 7th, and 8th graders) who were selected conveniently from 3 metropolitan cities located in different regions of Turkey in the fall semester of the 2017-2018 academic year. The original version of the scale consists of 37 items and it is a 5-point Likert scale. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was conducted for the data obtained from the Turkish version of the scale in order to check whether they fit the four-factor structure of the original scale. The analysis of data showed that it fits the four-factor structure. The reliability of each factor and the whole scale were checked by computing Cronbach’s coefficient of Alpha (α). Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the whole scale and the mathematics, science, engineering, and technology, and 21th-century skills were found to be as .91, .86, .87, .86, and .88, respectively. Based on the findings obtained in this study, The Attitude towards STEM Scale was adapted into Turkish in a valid and reliable way