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Makale Özeti:
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This study reports the development and validation process for an instrument to measure university students’ anxiety in physics courses. The development of the Physics Anxiety Rating Scale (PARS) included the following steps: Generation of scale items, content validation, construct validation, and reliability calculation. The results of construct validity analysis with 495 university education students showed that the scale consisted of four components: Physics course/test anxiety, anxiety about lack of physics knowledge, mathematics anxiety, and physics laboratory anxiety. The Cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficient was found as .95 for the whole scale and for the components it ranged from .83 to .92. Confirmatory factor analysis, using another sample of 864 university education students with similar characteristics as the previous sample suggested that the four factor model for the PARS is valid. Hence, each component displayed satisfactory internal consistency reliability. According to findings, the PARS may be a useful tool in identifying the anxiety of undergraduate students taking physics courses. It can be used to determine students’ physics anxiety in a particular course for instructional purposes or it can be used as a pre-and post-test to determine the change in students’ physics anxiety.
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