Özet:

This article reports results of a confirmatory factor analysis performed to cross-validate the factor structure of the Educators' Attitudes Toward Educational Research Scale. The original scale had been developed by the author and revised based on the results of an exploratory factor analysis. In the present study, the revised scale was given to 564 PreK-12 in-service educators (teachers, school counselors, administrators, etc.) working at schools in a big mid-Western city in the US. The scale had 29 Likert-type items intended to measure eight dimensions of the variable (at least three items per dimension). Obtained fit indices indicated a good fit between the data and the hypothesized factor structure. All parameter estimates were acceptable. Since there were no established variables in the literature to serve as criterion variables in the measurement of educators' attitudes toward educational research, data were collected on three variables (years of experience as an educator, research methods courses taken, and use of sources to learn about research findings) predicted to be correlates of this construct. To examine which ones might serve as criterion variables, analyses were performed to correlate these variables with subscale scores from the Educators' Attitudes Toward Educational Research Scale. Regarding the results of these correlational analyses, there was a high level of agreement between the present study and the previous exploratory factor analytic study which also looked at the same correlations, measuring the related variables in the same way as the present study did.

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