Validation of a Reading Attitude Scale for Elementary Students and an Investigation of the Relationship between Attitude and Achievement

While the original Estes Attitude Scale Toward Reading is a valid and reliable instrument for measuring the attitudes of secondary students toward reading, its vocabulary and sentence structure made it too difficult to use with elementary students. The purposes of this study were: (a) to simplify the Estes Scale without changing the concepts, (b) to validate the modified instrument, and (c) to investigate the relationship between attitude and reading achievement among elementary students. A total of 697 students from urban and rural areas and from grade levels three through six were involved. Student and teacher reading criterion measures, used to validate the Estes Scale, were employed to assure validation consistency. With the attitude scale as the treatment variable, and grade level and criterion measures as the classification variables, several two-way ANOVAs were computed for each criterion measure. It was found that the main effects, grade level and criterion measure, were highly significant for each ANOVA. Correlation between attitude and achievement scores was significant but low. It was concluded that the modified instrument can be used as a screening device to differentiate students with high and low attitudes toward reading.