DEVELOPMENT OF A CHILDREN QUESTIONNAIRE FOR MEASURING CHINESE CHARACTER LITERACY LEARNING SATISFACTION

Abstract

There are limited reports about development of questionnaire to measure learning satisfaction among young children. In this research, guidelines were listed for developing a questionnaire that gauges Chinese Character Literacy Learning Satisfaction (CCLLS) among 8-year-old children. The research was undertaken based on the responses of 232 children from 11 Chinese national type primary schools (SJKC) of Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia. The CCLLS questionnaire consists of 12 items developed through three dimensions of satisfaction, which are (1) Satisfaction towards Chinese characters writing, (2) Satisfaction towards Chinese characters recognizing, (3) Satisfaction towards the learning in classroom. Rasch analysis was used to examine the item polarity. The result showed point measure correlation was within 0.47 – 0.60. The items were also detected with the outfit mean square in the range of 0.76 – 1.24, indicating CCLLS was fit to measure the children’s learning satisfaction. The raw variance explained by measures (33.3%), the unexplained variance in first contrast (9.1%), with the eigenvalue (1.6%) from the principal component analysis, suggested that CCLLS could be unidimensional. The internal consistency was considered very high with 0.81 in Cronbach’s alpha (KR-20). The result also showed CCLLS has very good item reliability (0.91) with good item separation index (3.23). The person reliability (0.77) was in satisfactory range with moderately good person separation index (1.81). The findings indicated that CCLLS questionnaire could be a valid and reliable tool in measuring Chinese character literacy learning satisfaction among 8-year-old primary school children of SJKC. Keywords: children questionnaire, Chinese Characters Literacy Learning Satisfaction, Rasch analysis, validity and reliability