Measuring Students’ Beliefs about Physics in Saudi Arabia.

Over the last decade, science education researchers in the US have studied students’ beliefs about science and learning science and measured how these beliefs change in response to classroom instruction in science. In this paper, we present an Arabic version of the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) which was developed to measure students’ beliefs about physics at King Saud University (KSU) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. We describe the translation process, which included review by four experts in physics and science education and ten student interviews to ensure that the statements remained valid after translation. We have administered the Arabic CLASS to over 300 students in introductory physics courses at KSU’s men’s and women’s campuses. We present a summary of students’ beliefs about physics at KSU and compare these results to similar students in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]