A Pilot Study of Student Teachers' Infinity Thinking Assessment: Part I--Rasch Analysis

摘要

The Infinity Thinking Assessment (ITA) was developed to study how student teachers make sense of the concept of infinity (∞). Consequently, this pilot study aimed to examine the ITA which consists of 22 items in two constructs: Aspects of Infinity (AI) and Conceptions of Infinity (CI). The ITA was administered to student teachers from the Malaysian Institutes of Teacher Education (IPG), and the sample consisted of 40 respondents (out of 60). The quality of the items was evaluated in terms of unidimensionality, reliability, and internal consistency. Item reliability coefficients for the AI and CI were 0.90 and 0.95 respectively, while person reliabilities for the AI and the CI were much lower at 0.41 and 0.59 respectively. The low person reliabilities reflects the limited number of items in the survey. However, given that the study was conducted to examine the items rather than determining the ability of the respondents toward infinity thinking, the results appear satisfactory for a no-stakes description of the ITA traits. Only one item, in the CI subscale, warranted being put aside for revision due to its mis-fit indicators. Based on these findings, the instrument might be analysed as a single ITA scale and then used for testing in a larger sample to further validate the sequence of the items in the scale.