A study of the validity and reliability of a mathematics lesson attitude scale and student attitudes

Abstract

Attitudes of the students towards mathematics lessons are very important in terms of their success and motivation. The purpose of this study is to develop a scale for the assessment of primary school students' attitudes towards mathematics courses in the 2nd and 3rd grades, to analyse its validity-reliability structure and to determine the students' attitudes towards mathematics. Emotional facial expressions are used in the scale because students can have reading and writing literacy difficulties in the 2nd and 3rd grades. The study group of this research consisted of 350 primary school students studying in the 2nd and 3rd grades of primary schools located in Northern Cyprus. The Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient of the scale was 0.92. Factor analysis results suggested that the scale was gathered in one factor and total variance explained was 57.796% for one factor. In general, it is suggested that students' attitudes towards mathematics were 'happy'.