Abstract:

The aim of this study is to develop a measurement tool to determine and evaluate primary school students' attitudes towards reading. After the literature review and open-ended questions applied, an item pool was created with 50 judgment sentences. Items that were not deemed appropriate to be included in the scale were removed from the scale in line with expert opinions. The candidate scale, consisting of 45 items in total, was applied to primary school fourth grade students (n=513). In order to determine the factor structure of the scale, both exploratory (AFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (DFA) were performed. After the analyses, it was determined that the Attitudes towards Reading Scale (ATR) consisted of two subscales. There are 17 items in the first subscale, 8 items in the second subscale, and 25 items in the whole scale. The eigenvalue of the first factor of the scale is 10.35. The eigen value of the second factor was determined as 6.44. It was observed that the variance of the items in the whole scale was 25.77 and 41.40%. While the first subscale was called "emotional cohesion", the second subscale was named "need". It was determined that the factor load values of the “emotional cohesion” subscale were between 0.59 and 0.84. The factor load values of the “Needs” subscale ranged from 0.65 to 0.94. According to Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), the chi-square value of the model for the scale was found to be significant (X2 = 4.106, Df = 225, N =245, P < .001). Cronbach's Alpha values for the whole scale were determined as 0.93.

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