期刊名称:Physical Review ST Physics Education Research
电子版ISSN:1554-9178
出版年度:2020
卷号:16
页码:1-11
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.16.020104
出版社:American Physical Society
摘要:The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) is an instrument which is widely used in physics education to characterize students’ attitudes toward physics and learning physics and compare them with those of experts. While CLASS has been extensively validated for use in the context of higher education institutions in the United States, there has been less information about its use with European students. We have studied the structural, content, and substantive aspects of validity of CLASS by first doing a confirmatory factor analysis of N = 642 sets of student answers from the University of Helsinki, Finland. The students represented a culturally and demographically different subset of university physics students than in previous studies. The confirmatory factor analysis used a 3-factor, 15-item factor structure as a starting point and the resulting factor structure was similar to the original. Just minor modifications were needed for fit parameters to be in the acceptable range. We explored the differences by student interviews and consultation of experts. With the exception of one item, they supported the new 14-item, 3-factor structure. The results show that the interpretations made from CLASS results are mostly transferable, and CLASS remains a useful instrument for a wide variety of populations.