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.