I am currently working on revising the SRT Scale or Science Research Temperament Scale. The instrument was developed in the 1950’s by William Kosinar, who I am having an exceedingly difficult time finding. Perhaps I should try a “Yahoo!” people search as the Google and EBSCO searches have been quite uneventful. I have updated some of the vocabulary to conform with today’s vernacular. I focus-grouped with a group of seniors who rated all of the trait-words on the instrument for clarity and understanding. We concluded that 5 were not very clear and came up with alternatives.

I then had a larger group of sophomores rate the dichotomous word pairs for their favorites (e.g. easy of understanding, clarity, etc.) They only decisively picked three from the new list, one was a pretty even split, and the last original was actually preferred over the updated. I will change four and leave the one alone.

I am thinking I would like to do a validity/reliability study on the new version of the instrument. Perhaps Art can help me out by providing me with students in a General Chem class(es) at UConn. There are 42 items on the instrument so a quick cacluation says I need between 252 and 420 students for the Pilot. I should talk to Marcy and see what she thinks. Also would need IRB approval. I don’t think there are enough students at WSCU in large enough groups to make this worthwile – thus the UConn connection.

Welcome to my first “true” blog. Although I have many others, including the award-winning “Applied Science Research,” “CP Bio” “Blog-a-blog” and others (See full listing at labanca.net), I have decided to be reflective as I begin working on my Ed.D. dissertation at Western Connecticut. I will provide a link through the professional resources section of my website.

I am planning to follow the traditional blog posting style and hope my personality and ideas emerge. I welcome comments and suggestions as this journey begins over the next several years.