The Affective Side of Mathematics Education: Adapting a Mathematics Attitude Measure to the Context of Ethiopia

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to determine the factorial validity of an adapted “Attitudes towards Mathematics Inventory (ATMI)” measure. The ATMI was originally developed by Tapia and Marsh (2004) in the western culture to measure attitudes towards Mathematics. This paper reports the psychometric prosperities of the adapted Amharic version of the ATMI based on a sample of 385 Ethiopian university students enrolled for Mathematics classes. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) procedure is employed to test the factorial validity of the ATMI-Amharic. The results reveal that the original four-factor model (Self-confidence, Enjoyment, Motivation, and Value) is retained for the adapted ATMI-Amharic since no statistically significant difference (χ2= 1.827, p = 0.401; RMSEA < 0.0001) was found between the base and the observed models. Further, a test of factorial invariance across gender groups and year-levels also yielded that the model has measurement invariance revealing the ATMI-Amharic is independent of gender and number of years in college. Besides, the coefficient alphas for the four subscales (α = 0.78-0.89) and for the overall measure (α = 0.94) are found to be high. The implications of the findings in relation to the psychometric properties of the ATMI-Amharic and its use in Ethiopian context are discussed.