Abstract
In this study, it wa s a imed to develop a sca le to determine the a ttitudes of students towa rds problem ba sed lea rning. Da ta wa s ga thered from two groups of students; the first group being comprised of 761 students from four medical schools and the second group being comprised of 810 students from one medical school. In the study, item-total correlation and difference of lower-upper group means based item analysis technique, t test, Kruskal Wallis analysis as well as factor analysis was used and Cronbach α coefficient was calculated. The reliability of the scale was found to be high (α= 0.95). In addition, the scale’s ability to distinguish students with different attitudes was found to be statistically significant (p<0.001). In factor analysis of both studies, positive and negative items of the scale were found to assemble in two separate dimensions and to explain the major part (61.32% in the first study, 5 8.8 7 % in the second study) of the sca le’s tota l va riance. The results of the study indicate that the scale has good psychometric properties.
Keywords: Problem based learning, attitude, scale development, medical students
Copyright and license
Copyright © 2010 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is properly cited.