The Turkish Adaptation of Implicit Theory of Intelligence Scale: The Validity and Reliability Study

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to adapt the Implicit Theory of Intelligence Scale (ITIS) by Abd-El-Fattah and Yates (2006) to Turkish and to investigate its psychometric properties. The study was conducted on four different samples which consisted of 689 students who studied different subjects at the Ziya Gokalp Faculty of Education, Dicle University, during the Fall Term of the 2012-2013 Academic Year. The findings on the linguistic equivalence indicated that the correlation between the items included in the Turkish and original form varied between .81 and .96. The factor analysis concluded that the Turkish version had a two-factor structure in parallel with the original one. As for the concurrent validity, the calculation of correlation between the ITIS and AGOS reported findings similar to the ones in the literature. The reliability coefficients were over .70 for both the entity theory and incremental theory. The item analysis reported that the corrected item total correlations ranged from .33 and .63 and the differences between the top and bottom 27% groups were significant for all the items included in the scale. All these findings suggest that the Turkish version of the ITIS is a valid and reliable instrument that can be used to measure university students’ beliefs about intelligence.