Social Studies Oriented Achievement Goal Scale (SOAGS): Validity and Reliability Study

This study aims to develop a valid and reliable instrument for measuring students' social studies achievement goal. The research was conducted on a study group consisted of 374 middle school students studying in the central district of Diyarbakır in 2014-2015 school year fall semester. Expert opinion was consulted with regard to the scale's content and face validity. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) were performed in order to measure the scale's construct validity. As a result of EFA, a 29-item and a six-factor structure model which explains 50.82% of the total variance was obtained. The emerging factors were called as a self-approach, task-approach, other-approach, task-avoidance, other-avoidance and self-avoidance respectively. The findings acquired CFA indicated that the 29-item and six-factor structure related to social studies oriented achievement goal scale have acceptable goodness of fit indices. The scale's reliability coefficients were calculated by means of internal consistency method. As a result of reliability analysis, it was determined that the reliability coefficients were within admissible limits. The finding of the item correlation and 27% of upper and lower group comparisons demonstrated that all of the items in the scale should remain. In light of these results, it could be argued that the scale is reliable and valid instrument and can be used in order to test students' social studies achievement goals