Assessment of Validity and Reliability of Geography Interest Questionnaire among Pre-service Teachers in Colleges of Education, North-West, Nigeria

This study assessed validity and reliability of geography interest questionnaire among pre-service teachers in colleges of education, North-West, Nigeria. The study adopted survey research design. The questionnaire consists of adapted items underwent validation tests for face, content, construct validities and reliability. From the 9 validators’ assessments face and content indices found are 0.91 and 0.99 respectively. For construct validity and reliability, the instrument was administered on 129 geography pre-service teachers. The instrument was adapted from a work of Knekta, Rowland, Corwin and Eddy (2020). For construct validity exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were used. The instrument went through EFA, and findings include three-factor structure formed as factor loads related to FGC items are between .802 and .916, those of VGC factor are between .763 and .913, and those of IGA factor are between .860 and .918, all factor loadings exceeded .50, and no cross-loading as well, these indicate convergent and discriminant validity. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) further supported the validity, with composite reliability (CR) (i.e. IGA= 0.908, FGC= 0.925 and VGC= 0.924) and average variance extracted (AVE) (i.e. 0.713, 0.675 and 0.670) are higher than .70 and .50 respectively. And the inter-factor correlation (i.e. 0.244, -0.123, and 0.002) is less than the √AVE (i.e. 0.844, 0.822 and .819). The Cronbach's Alpha coefficient is .813. It is proved the instrument is highly valid and reliable, so, it is recommended to use the questionnaire to gather data of geography students’ interest in the discipline. Keyword: Geography, Interest-Questionnaire, Validity and Reliability