Development of a Scale to Measure Teacher Candidates’ Attitudes toward Research

The purpose of this study is to develop a ‚Scale of Attitudes toward Research? (SAR) to quantify the attitudes of teacher-candidates towards research. The SAR was applied to 359 (93 female, 266 male) teacher-candidates from the Dicle University, Siirt Faculty of Education in Turkey. In analyzing the data, the Varimax rotation technique was utilized along with principal component analysis. From a draft scale of 60 items, a 31 item scale was developed, 22 of which had positive connotations and 9 of which had negative connotations. Cronbach's Alpha reliability coefficient of the scale was found to be 0.897. The sub-categories of the scale were named ‚interest towards research,? ‚importance,? ‚motivation,? ‚efficacy,? and ‚concern.