Abstract

This article reports a study intended to develop a scale that measures attitudes of PreK-12 in-service educators toward educational research. A major part of the study was an exploratory factor analysis of the educators’ attitudes toward educational research scale. The scale was given to 193 PreK-12 in-service educators (teachers, school counselors, school psychologists, etc.) working at schools in a big mid-western city in the US. The original scale had 40 Likert-type items intended to measure eight dimensions of the construct (five items for each). Based on the results, some items were eliminated; however, the revised scale could still measure all eight dimensions with at least three items each. At the time of data collection, focus groups were held with some of the respondents to discuss the scale. Comments from the focus groups matched highly with the statistical results in identifying the malfunctioning items in the original scale. Since there were no established variables in the literature to serve as measures of criterion-related validity of measurement of attitudes toward educational research, data were collected on a number of variables predicted to be correlates of this construct. To examine which ones might serve as criterion variables, analyses were performed to correlate these variables with factor scores from the educators’ attitudes toward educational research scale.

Key words: Educational research, teacher attitudes, factor analysis, scale development.