Purpose and Procedures
The purpose of this study was to construct and validate an assessment instrument which could effectively measure the impact of implementing an environmental education component to the Level III program of the elementary teacher training program at Utah State University. It was the hope of this researcher that the test would also be administered to Level III students upon completion in subsequent quarters to indicate individual competence in the environmental education.
Care was taken in the construction of the instrument to assure content validity of concepts considered important by local, university, and state environmental education reviewers. A preliminary form of the instrument constructed in the study was administered to a pilot group. An item analysis was performed to determine the level of difficulty as well as the ability of the distractors to distract. The final form of the test consisted of 36 multiple-choice items. The final form was administered twice to a second group of Level III students. Data from these two administrations were used to establish the internal reliability of the instrument by using the Marshall-Haertel reliability formula. The reliability of stability between administrations was established by using the test-retest formula.
Results
Using the Marshall-Haertel reliability formula, the reliability coefficient of the instrument for the first testing was .81. The variance of this administration was 10.96, resulting in a standard deviation of 3.31. The second testing had a reliability coefficient of .78. This second administration had a variance and standard deviation of 11.42 and 3.38 respectively. In examining the test results of the first and second administrations, the mean raw scores show a positive impact in learning gains occurring between the two testings. Using the test-retest reliability formula, the Pearson-product-moment correlation was .8191.
A content validity was established through a review of the items by critical reviewers who had background in environmental education. Each reviewer was given a copy of the objectives of the environmental education component and a copy of the item pool. Based on individual judgement, each reviewer matched test items to the objective in which they felt it was testing. The final test form consisted only of those items receiving a 100% agreement in the item pool review.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTAHS/oai:digitalcommons.usu.edu:etd-4365 |
| Date | 01 May 1979 |
| Creators | Fukui, Francine |
| Publisher | DigitalCommons@USU |
| Source Sets | Utah State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | All Graduate Theses and Dissertations |
| Rights | Copyright for this work is held by the author. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners. Works not in the public domain cannot be commercially exploited without permission of the copyright owner. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user. For more information contact Andrew Wesolek (andrew.wesolek@usu.edu). |
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