Abstract:

Background:
‘Nature-human-society’ (NMG) is a subject in Switzerland’s kindergarten and primary school. It includes a range of social and natural sciences disciplines, which implies that contents of biology, physics, chemistry, technology, geography, history, politics, economy, religious, ethics and social sciences are taught in an integrated approach. In NMG education, teachers organise their lessons in a multi- and interdisciplinary way but also regularly focus on the core theme of a special discipline. Kindergarten and primary-school teachers have general bachelor’s degrees, which suggests that their interests and competencies are not equally formed for each of these disciplines. Therefore, it is important to consider trainee teachers’ attitudes and academic self-concepts towards these disciplines, because it is known that they could influence future teaching behaviour.

Aim and methods:
The NMG questionnaire aims to measure and identify trainee teachers’ preferences within seven perspectives of the subject NMG (social/ethical, cultural/religious, historical/political, geographical, economical, physical/technical, biological). It was originally developed by Marco Adamina as a self-assessment instrument for teacher-training purposes and was not yet envisaged for research. In order to know if the NMG questionnaire allows accurate measurement for uses in research projects, a process of scale development, standardisation and validation is launched and documented in this article. In the first phase, the content validity of the existing items is assessed. The original questionnaire consisted of twelve items that trainee teachers should rate for each of the seven perspectives. To evaluate if the items are meaningful to the target population, pre-tests were conducted with a small sample before administering the survey. Thus, unclear items could be eliminated or improved to produce valid measurements. After that, the phase with scale development began. Subjects were recruited at the University of Teacher Education Bern. Three hundred and forty-nine trainee teachers completed the revised NMG questionnaire, so the needed sample size of 300 participants was reached to conduct a factor analysis. The scales were finally evaluated through reliability testing and validity assessment.

Results and discussion:
The results provide evidence of the items’ psychometric quality and demonstrate adequate reliability based on the factors’ internal consistency. The factor structure ‘affection’, ‘self-concept’ and ‘experience’ could be found in each of the seven perspectives, so that it was maintained even if a few factor loadings were low within some perspectives. The validity of the NMG questionnaire was confirmed with the scales of the standardised questionnaire AIST-R, which measures the vocational interests’ assessments according to Holland`s RIASEC model. In summary, the findings support the revised NMG questionnaire’s psychometric adequacy.

Keywords:

Attitude, social sciences, natural sciences, questionnaire, trainee teacher, psychometric properties.