Teacher Beliefs About Sustainable Agriculture: A Self-made Measurement Scale
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The study’s purpose was to analyze the validity of the construct of a self-made Alternative-Conventional Agricultural Paradigm scale using the teacher population teaching high school agriculture in the North Central Region of the USA. A random sample of 844 teachers was drawn. Teachers were self-administered questionnaires with 5-point Likert-type scales. Instrument inter-item consistency and item coherence were determined. The relatively high coefficient alpha (.82), mean item total correlation (.40), and unrotated first factors with modest number of items loading on the factor means that the scale has mainly one underlying construct. The teacher population holds consistent views and attitudes about SA constituting an agricultural paradigm. The instrument items are coherent as components of a whole and are related. However, the teacher population did not hold stronger paradigmatic views on the scale as can be expected because of their relatively low mean score item-total correlation and coefficient alpha for the instrument compared to what was found for the scale in the Beus and Dunlap (1991) study. This should be expected because agriculture teachers are not strong adherents of the two agricultural paradigms who can be expected to make extreme and polar scores on the scale. The instrument can therefore be used to preliminarily gauge the paradigmatic orientation of agriculture teachers in the region. Further research with the instrument with known groups supporting the two paradigms is necessary to establish its validity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".