Constructing the Teachers' Attitudes Toward Computers (TAC) Questionnaire.

This paper reports on the first stage of the construction and refinement process underway in pursuit of developing a brief composite instrument to measure teachers' attitudes toward computers. Items (n=284) from 14 questionnaires assessing teacher attitudes toward computers were completed by 118 educators in Texas in 1995. Internal consistency reliabilities for the 32 Likert-type and Semantic Differential subscales included in the battery ranged from 0.41 to 0.96, with 27 of the 32 indices falling in the "respectable" range of 0.70 of higher. Forty-five of the correlation indices computed for the subscales were 0.70 or higher, indicating that many subscale pairs shared half their variance or more in common. A higher-order factor analysis of the 32 subscales indicated that 4 higher-order attributes probably exist among the 32 subscales, and a cluster analysis of the subscales produced 6 major clusters. The next step will be to gather data from a greater number of educators to derive a stable factor structure for the original items and an eventual shorter form. Appendix A lists the TAC subscales, and Appendix B presents the test. (Contains 2 figures, 7 tables, and 23 references.) (SLD)