Students’ attitudes toward technology: exploring the relationship among affective,cognitive and behavioral components of the attitude construct

International Journal of Technology and Design Education - When studying attitudes toward technology education, the affective attitudinal component has primarily been the focus. This study focuses...     

Understanding attitude measurement: exploring meaning and use of the PATT short questionnaire

The pupils’ attitudes toward technology survey (PATT) has been used for 30 years and is still used by researchers. Since it was first developed, the validity of the questionnaire constructs has primarily been discussed from a statistical point of view, while few researchers have discussed the type of attitudes and interest that the questionnaire measures. The purpose of this study is to increase the knowledge about student interpretations and the meaning of their answers in the recently developed PATT short questionnaire (PATT-SQ). To research this, a mixed methods approach was used, where the qualitative data from six interviewees (students aged 14) help to explain and interpret the quantitative data from 173 respondents (students aged 12–15). The interviewed students completed a Swedish version of the PATT-SQ 3 weeks prior a semistructured interview. The results from this study imply that the PATT-SQ survey can be used mostly as it is, but this study also shows that there are some categories that require some caution when being analyzed and discussed. For example, the gender category cannot be used as intended since it does not measure what it is supposed to and it might be gender-biased. The interest category can advantageously be reduced to four items to focus on school technology, which will indicate how deep a student’s well-developed individual interest is. And the career category seems to only detect students’ who urge a career in technology, while the other students lack knowledge about what that career might be and therefore they are not interested in such a career.