Development of Attitude Scale Toward the Usage of History of Mathematics

In this study, the aim is to develop an attitude scale in order to identify the students’ attitudes toward the usage of history of mathematics (ASUHM). In order to conduct the validity and reliability studies, the scale was administered to 113 students as 69 eight grade students and 44 ninth grade students in Trabzon city in Turkey. For the overall validity of the scale, its content and construct were examined. The reliability analysis was performed by computing the item-total correlation, Cronbach’s Alpha (internal consistency coefficient). Furthermore, for reliability, two groups including the lower 27% and upper 27% were created using their total scores, and the difference between the item-mean scores of these groups was examined using the independent samples t-test. Following all validity and reliability studies, the researchers obtained a scale consisting of 16 items and single factor. Cronbach’s Alpha reliability coefficient of the scale was 0.95 and explains 60.6% of the total variance. These results indicate that the scale is reliable and valid and it can be used to determine students’ attitude toward the usage of history of mathematics.