Development of An Inventory to Classify Task Commitment Type in Science Learning and Its Application to Classify Students' Types

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to develop an inventory to classify task commitment types of science learning and to classify highschool students' task commitment types. Firstly, inventory questions were designed following the literature analysis on the task commitment components which involve self confidence, high goal setting, and focused attention. Prototype inventory underwent the content validity test, pilot test, and reliability test. Through these steps, final inventory was input to 462 high school students and underwent the factor analysis and cluster analysis. Factor analysis confirmed three components of task commitment as the three factors of inventory questions. In order to find how many clusters exist, factors of developed inventory became new variables. Each factor's factor mean was calculated and served as the new variable of the cluster analysis. Cluster analysis extracted five clusters as task commitment types. The 5 clusters were suggested by the agglomarative schedule and dendrogram gained from a hierarchical cluster analysis with the setting of the Ward algorithm and Squared Euclidean distance. Based on the factor mean score, traits of each cluster could be drawn out. Inventory developed by this study is expected to be used to identify student commitment types and assess the effectiveness of task commitment enhancement programs.