Assessing the Validity and Reliability of the Students’ Attitude to Ecology Questionnaire (SAEQ) for Measuring Academic Achievement in Ecology Among Secondary School Students in Kano State, Nigeria: A Systematic Approach

Hauwa'u Iliyasu, Garba Shuaibu, Faith Sadoh

Abstract


This paper presents a systematic approach to methodological processes of validity and reliability of Students' Attitude to Ecology questionnaire on Science Secondary School Students’ Academic Achievement in Ecology, Kano State-Nigeria. Three research objectives and three research questions guided the study. Twenty SSII students were selected and pilot-tested from two schools for the study and coded 1-10 for males and 11-20 for females. The instrument consists of two sections A and B: Section A comprises demographic data (name of school, Age and Gender) while section B consist of 20 items, five five-point Likert scales, ordinal, closed-ended questionnaire. The validation was determined by five experts in biology and education for face and content validity. Corrections were made on some of the contents for editing, spellings across the items to be corrected include: the researcher’s salutation, address and coding of participants for easy identification. Lawshe’s method and Scale items content validity (S-ICV/average) method were used to determine the Content Validity Ratio (CVR) and Content Validity Index (CVI). The test re-test method was used for reliability and Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient (PPMC) was used for data analyses using SPSS Ver.20 at a probability of 0.05% level of significance. The result of SAEQ for CVR and CVI was +1.00 on the instrument indicating the perfect level of agreement among the panel of judges while the reliability of SAEQ was found to be 0.70. Based on these validity and reliability estimates, it was concluded that SAEQ is valid, reliable and can be used as a collecting instrument in ecology.  Recommendations were also made on the use of SAEQ.


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