Designing an Energy Literacy Questionnaire for Middle and High School Youth

Abstract

A measurement scale has been developed to assess secondary students’ energy literacy—a citizenship understanding of energy that includes cognitive as well as affective and behavioral items. Instrument development procedures followed psychometric principles from educational and social psychology research. Initial exploration of the measure yielded promising results: internal consistencies for the cognitive, affective, and behavioral subscales, measured by Cronbach's α, ranged from 0.75 to 0.83; average discrimination indices ranged from 0.27 to 0.46. The instrument's validity was supported with contrasted-groups and developmental-age progression comparisons, as well as factor analyses. The energy literacy questionnaire provides an opportunity to measure baseline levels of energy literacy and to assess broader impacts of educational interventions.

Keywords:

• energy education
• energy literacy
• energy questionnaire
• survey

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors acknowledge with appreciation the six individuals (A. Heidenreich, W. Kissam, J. Lane, T. Rogers, A. Schwartz, K. Visser) who served on the expert validity panel and reviewed survey criteria and potential items, as well as the numerous teachers and students who assisted in the pilot studies. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation through their Distinguished Teaching Scholar award (DUE-0428127). The findings and opinions presented here do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the funding agency.