Pre-Service Primary School Teachers’ Beliefs, Understanding and Intentions towards STEM Education: A Tool Adaptation Study

Abstract

The purpose of the current study is the adaptation of the measurement tool developed by Kurup, Brown, Powell and Li (2017) to determine pre-service primary teachers’ beliefs, understandings and intentions about STEM education into Turkish. In the adaptation process, first the scale was translated into Turkish and then it was back-translated into the original language and the compliance of the translation with the original scale was checked by field experts. The adaptation study of the measurement tool was carried out on 220 pre-service primary teachers attending a university located in the Eastern Anatolian Region of Turkey in the 2020-2021 academic year. Reliability and validity analyses of the adapted measurement tool were conducted. As a result of the Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), it was revealed that the belief scale in the measurement tool has 4 items, the understanding scale has 5 items and the intention scale has 5 items. The reliability coefficients of the scales were found to be as follows; .54 for the belief scale, .69 for the understanding scale and .82 for the intention scale. In addition, it has been revealed that there is a differentiation between the item-total correlation values of each item in each scale and the item means of those in the lower 27% and upper 27% groups as a result of the comparison made with the independent samples t-test. As a result of the values obtained from the analyses, the Scale of Pre-service Primary Teachers’ Beliefs, Understandings and Intentions about STEM Education was found to be a reliable and valid measurement tool.