Pupils’ attitudes towards art teaching in primary school: an evaluation tool

art subject and they were presented with the scale. Instructions were read loud and there
was an explanation of the two five-point response scales.

The reliability and validity of the scale

Evidence of reliability

The reliability of the scale was examined first, for adequate reliability is a precondition to
validity. The internal consistency measure, Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient, was used to
show whether the items of each subscale were correlated with each other. The alpha
scores obtained for each subscale indicated a high level of internal consistency
(Cronbach’s alpha > .75 and inter-item correlation > .40 respectively, see table 1).

Table 1

Confirmatory factor analysis

The Amos 5 (Analysis of Moment Structures) software was used to perform a
Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) in order to test whether the four-factor structure of
the attitude scale was appropriate. In a Confirmatory Factor Analysis an a priori model is
fitted on to the data. The fit of the model is evaluated by means of a Chi-square statistical
test. The null hypothesis underlying the test statistic is model fit, thus significance
implies misfit of the model (Joreskog and Sorbom, 1989). In evaluating our model we
examined several fit indices. As Griffin (2005) suggests it is necessary to use at least four
fit indices to build an overall understanding of fit to the measurement model; model fit is
a multifaceted concept and no fit indices in isolation should be considered. Thus, we

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