Literary Curiosity Scale for Secondary Education Students: A Scale Development Study

Abstract

This study is an attitude scale development study that reveals high school students (9th, 10th, 11th grades) literary curiosity. It is thought that students with high literary curiosity have a reading culture. Reading culture is a reading level reached by transforming reading into a habit and critical reading skill. The scale created for this purpose is a 5-point Likert-type scale consisting of 30 items. The scales pilot study was conducted on 522 high school students in the fall semester of the 2018-2019 academic year. Exploratory factor analysis was performed to assess the construct validity of the scale. A relationship was found between the variables in the factor analysis of the items (KMO=0.955>0.60). This size was sufficient for factor analysis. As a result of the factor analysis, the variables were gathered under four factors with a total explained variance of 52.664%. The Cronbach’s Alpha (α) internal consistency coefficient for the scale items was found to be 0.945. According to the scale and test-retest findings, the scale scores differed in the bottom 27% and top 27% groups. Therefore, the literary curiosity scale was found out to be a valid and reliable instrument considering the alpha for reliability, the explained variance value, and the factor loads.