Development Of an Anxiety Scale for Chemistry

Abstract

Chemistry is regarded as a difficult subject by many; but at the same time, it takes an important place in middle and high school curriculum and many college degree programs require chemistry courses. Therefore, researchers have attempted to develop instruments to assess the levels of chemistry anxiety. This study aimed to develop an “Anxiety Scale for Chemistry”, which is essential to setting an alternative for existing tools to determine anxiety for chemistry of students. This study has been carried out to develop a tool to measure the level of anxiety of students studying in the high schools in Turkey. The scale was developed as a result of the following processes: (1) Literature scan and creation of the item pool, (2) Taking expert opinions, (3) Itemtotal correlations, (4) Item distinctiveness features (5) Exploratory factor analysis (6), Cronbach’s Alpha internal consistency reliability, (7) Examination of correlations between sub dimensions, (8) Confirmatory factor analysis. According to the results obtained, the scale is acceptably reliable for the research in social sciences.