Educational Interest Inventory: Construction and Standardization

Teachers need psychological instruments to be able to measure extent of students' educational interests.The present research paper reports efforts related to construction and standardization of an educational interest inventory for measuring students' interests in their academic subjects.The try-out form had 21 situations and each situation had a list of ten tasks.Students were asked to indicate the intensity of their preference for each given activity/task related to each situation by choosing one of the five responses namely-'very less, less, average, much and very much' Scoring was done by assigning a score of 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 for 'very less, less, normal, much and very much' responses.Scores on all items related to an area of interest were added together to get ten interest scores.Item analysis was done by calculating Chi-squares and item-total correlations for each item.Final form of the inventory has 15 situations and the 97 items included under them.Test-retest reliability were computed for different dimensions of interest.They were .89for physical science, .88 for biological science, .98 for commerce, .84 for literary, .78 for social service, .74 for office management, .89for mathematics, .81 for religious, .88 for Music, and .78for home science.Face validity was established.