DEVELOPMENT OF AN INSTRUMENT FOR ASSESSING ELEMENTARY STUDENTS'SCIENTIFIC LITERACY ON READING SCIENCE TEXT

摘要

Knowing and understanding of the language of science is viewed as an essential component of scientific literacy. There is a need to develop an instrument for assessing elementary students' scientific literacy through reading science text. In order to provide an overview of one such assessment, we report the process of development and the results of a recent pilot testing conducted in Taiwan with the forth and sixth graders. The process of the development involves two phases: (a) defining the components of science literacy regarding reading science text; (b) developing an instrument using science text and items for assessing science literacy. The final version of the instrument contains two versions of test: one is for middle level of elementary school students (grade 3 and 4), the other is for higher level of elementary school students (grade 5 and 6). The item difficluty, discriminality and the correlations between components of scientific literacy for both versions of the test were examined.