Page 44 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

2.2.1 Need for cognition
Need for cognition was measured in Chapters 4 and 5 with the e cient version of the Need for Cognition Scale (NCS) developed by Cacioppo, Petty, and Kao (1984). In both studies, alphas were above .80.
2.2.2 Academic interest 2 Academic interest is a construct that we used in three studies (Chapters 4, 5, and
7). In all three studies, the scale was di erent, which is due to further improvement
of the scale and due to sample di erences (secondary school students in Chapters
4 and 5, and university students in Chapter 7). In this paragraph we will elaborate on this.
For the pilot study, Chapter 4, we developed six items to measure academic interest that had good face value and proved to be consistent – and understandable for students – in a small-scale pilot test that we did before we started the Chapter 4 data collection. ese items measured the extent to which students were interested in gaining academic knowledge and in doing research. In the data collection for Chapter 4, these items had a good internal consistency.
Before starting the data collection of Chapter 5, we found two existing questionnaires that had some items that tapped into academic interest: the Scienti c Attitude Inventory II (SAI II) by Moore and Foy (1997) and the Modi ed Attitudes Toward Science Inventory (MATSI) by Weinburgh and Steele (2000). Items of these questionnaires matched the academic interest construct we intended to measure and were related to the six items we had already developed, hence we added some of them to our scale. From the SAI II we used eight items about liking and disliking gaining new knowledge and doing research (e.g., “ e search for scienti c knowledge would be boring”) and from the MATSI we used three items that tapped into science-related anxiety (e.g., “It makes me nervous to even think about doing science”). is resulted in a total of 17 items that measured academic interest in Chapter 5, which had an internal consistency of .92. Another change compared to Chapter 4 was that in the questionnaire for Chapter 5 we changed the scale range of academic interest from 4 to 5. Reasons were that we did not want to force students to choose an option when they were really neutral towards the statement and that we wanted to make the questionnaire more consistent – most other factors were also measured on a 5-point Likert scale.
In contrast to the studies in Chapters 4 and 5, which had secondary school students as sample, the study in Chapter 7 took place in the rst year of university.
Method
43