Adaptation of the epistemological beliefs in science scale for high school students in Türkiye

Abstract

In this study, we adapted the Epistemological Beliefs in Science Scale originally developed by Conley et al. (2004) for high school students in Türkiye. Some previous studies done in Türkiye have been conducted to adapt this scale for different target audiences and revealed different factorial structures from the original scale and lost some items. Therefore, we aim to investigate the scale's psychometric properties for high school students. We applied the scale to 1205 9th to 12th-grade students face-toface in three public high schools in Yalova district in Türkiye. We used confirmatory factor analysis to examine the fit of the observed model to the expected model based on the theoretical framework developed by Conley et al. (2004). We also investigated the convergent and divergent validities of the scale. For scale reliability, Cronbach alpha and omega coefficients were calculated. We comparatively discussed the psychometric properties of the scale with previous studies. We have concluded that the factorial structure in this study was almost the same as in the original scale and can be considered to use in high schools in Türkiye. We also have some improvement suggestions for a better scale.