Development A scale to Measure Attitudes of First Cycle Basic Education Students in Oman Towards Reading

Abstract

This study aimed to develop a scale to measure the attitudes of basic education students towards reading. A sample of 400 students from Omani public schools from five educational governorates participated in the study. The participants were from the fourth grade, which marks the end of the first cycle of basic education (grades one through four) according to the educational system in Oman. The study went through the steps of content validity by presenting the initial version of the scale to experts. Then, exploratory factor analysis was conducted, showing that the items of the scale could be classified from two dimensions to four dimensions, accounting for 44% of the variance among the items. For the purposes of the study, the scale items were divided into two dimensions: attitudes towards reading for study purposes, and attitudes towards reading for enjoyment and leisure.To ensure the representativeness of the items for the scale, confirmatory factor analysis was used to verify the suitability of the proposed model using the AMOS software. The results confirmed that the proposed model fit well, all indicaters of Chi-square to degrees of freedom ratio, the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) index, the Goodness of Fit Index (GFI), the Adjusted Goodness of Fit Index (AGFI), the Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI), the Comparative Fit Index (CFI), and the Root Mean Square Residual (RMR) concluded that the model demonstrates a good fit. In additional the result of the reliability shows that the Cronbach’s alpha for this instrument is (0.833) and the Cronbach’s alpha for scale items ranged from (0.17) to (0.834) which indicate to a confidant for the implementing.