Developing scientific literacy for all students is the most often stated purpose of contemporary science education. Nature of science (NOS) is seen as an important component of scientific literacy. There are various perceptions of NOS in the science education community and NOS itself is an ever-changing construct. This makes it challenging to develop instruments for measuring understanding of NOS at different levels. Many instruments have been developed and are being developed to assess NOS learning, which indicates the importance attributed to this subject. In this study, we developed a multiple-choice test to measure NOS understanding of middle school students. The instrument was applied to 1397 middle school students. The 24 item multiple-choice test had KR-20 reliability coefficient of 0.74. A 12 item multiple-choice test created as a subset of the 24 items of the original test. This test was easier and had higher discrimination, which can provide useful measurement data about students’ understanding of NOS for diagnostic or formative purposes.

中文翻译：

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衡量中学生科学观点的性质

为所有学生发展科学素养是当代科学教育最常说的目的。科学本质（NOS）被视为科学素养的重要组成部分。在科学教育界，人们对NOS的看法多种多样，而NOS本身就是一个不断变化的结构。这使得开发用于测量不同级别的NOS理解的工具具有挑战性。已经开发了许多工具，并且正在开发评估NOS学习的工具，这表明了归因于该主题的重要性。在这项研究中，我们开发了一项多项选择测验，以衡量中学生对NOS的理解。该仪器被应用于1397名中学生。24项选择题测试的KR-20可靠性系数为0.74。作为原始测试的24个项目的子集创建了12个项目的多项选择测试。该测试更容易并且具有更高的辨别力，可以为学生对诊断或形成目的的NOS理解提供有用的测量数据。