Development and test of an instrument that investigates teachers' beliefs, attitudes and intentions concerning the educational use of simulations

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to develop an instrument, namely, a questionnaire that investigates teachers' beliefs, attitudes, and intentions concerning the use of simulations for educational purposes, including for teaching science. The development of such an instrument is needed because of the absence of an instrument that specifically targets teachers and simulation use for educational purposes. To date, the only questionnaires that are available in this domain focus on technology or computer technologies in general, which from our perspective are not proper for investigating teachers' beliefs, attitudes, and intentions towards the use of simulations, in the sense that we do not know how each teacher defines or understands the term computer technology. The development of the questionnaire was based on attitude-behaviour theories/models developed in prior research studies focusing on the affective domain and computer technologies. For validity and reliability purposes, we collected data from 514 elementary school teachers who were aware of what a simulation is and taught science before this study. All participants were randomly selected. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was also implemented on the data captured in order to reach a possible simulation acceptance model. Finally, besides reporting on the development of this instrument and its underlying model, we present findings that concern our teachers' beliefs, attitudes, and intentions concerning the use of simulations for educational purposes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)