Development of health education attitude scale for primary school teachers

Abstract

One of the most important factors influencing health education in primary education is the attitude of the teacher towards health and health education. The purpose of the study is to develop an attitude scale oriented at health education for teachers teaching in primary education. The first stage of the study consists of attempts to determine the attitude of primary school teachers towards health education. In the following stage, these attitudes have been converted to a measurable form. For this purpose, first of all an item pool was constituted. Afterwards, items selected from this pool were converted to a five point Likert type scale. This scale was applied based on voluntariness to 267 prospective teachers studying in the final year of the Elementary Teaching, Science Teaching, and Biology Teaching Departments at the Balikesir University, Necatibey Faculty of Education. As a result of the validity and reliability analyses conducted and the expert opinions obtained, a 35 item scale on attitudes of teachers towards health education was formed.