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New engineering educators need to be equipped with instruments that can provide easy and meaningful insight into students’ self-directed learning (SDL) status so they can better foster students’ success. Students who are self-directed learners can independently initiate and take full responsibility for learning, effectively utilize available resources in the pursuit of their goals, develop awareness of their learning, and demonstrate the appropriate attitude essential for individual and collaborative learning. Despite these benefits, developing SDL skills in engineering students is often overlooked. To address this, educators have a facilitating role to play in the development of engineering students’ SDL skills, however, this role can be challenging for them due to the (a) high cost of using SDL instruments, especially in a large classroom and (b) uncertainty about the validity of SDL instruments. Moreover, these challenges may be more pronounced for new engineering educators. This study addresses these challenges by reporting the validity evidence for an SDL assessment instrument called the Self-Rating Scale of Self-Directed Learning (SRSSDL). The SRSSDL instrument has been widely utilized in medical education, but in this study, it was modified for the engineering education context. The utility of this 8-constructs, 46-item scale was demonstrated in engineering education with 111 undergraduate students across all academic levels, and the validity test was conducted in line with the contemporary validity framework. The result of the validity test of the SRSSDL revealed inconsistencies or instability of its constructs in the engineering education context.
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CHALLENGES ASSOCIATED WITH MEASURING ATTITUDES USING THE SATS FAMILY OF INSTRUMENTS
The Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics (SATS) is a widely used family of instruments for measuring attitude constructs in statistics education. Since the development of the SATS instruments, there has been an evolution in the understanding of validity in the field of educational measurement emphasizing validation as an on-going process. While a 2012 review of statistics education attitude instruments noted that the SATS family had the most validity evidence, two types of challenges to the use of these instruments have emerged: challenges to the interpretations of scale scores and challenges using the SATS instruments in populations other than undergraduate students enrolled in introductory statistics courses. A synthesis of the literature and empirical results are used to document these challenges.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2013392
- PAR ID:
- 10386401
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- STATISTICS EDUCATION RESEARCH JOURNAL
- Volume:
- 21
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1570-1824
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 4
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.52041/serj.v21i1.88
