Developing a Financial Literacy Scale for Primary School Students: A Validity and Reliability Study

Abstract

This study aims to develop a valid and reliable measurement tool to determine the financial literacy levels of primary school 4th-grade students. The research sample consists of 567 4th-grade primary school students studying in the Kahta district of Adıyaman. The prepared scale items were sent to the field experts for content and opinion validity, and the scale was and finalized according to their feedback. As the second step, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was performed to determine the scale’s construct validity. As a result of the EFA, a draft scale consisting of 17 items and 3 sub-dimensions was obtained, which explained 40.9% of the total variance. The factor loads of these 17 items ranged from 0.439 to 0.840. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed to verify this draft scale. According to the CFA results, the goodness of fit indices are as follows: χ2/df = 1.138, RMSEA = 0.023, GFI = 0.95, SRMR = 0.049, CFI = 0.98, and NFI = 0.82. The values found due to CFA show that the scale items were well validated. The significance of the item discrimination coefficients was tested using the test-retest reliability coewith fficient, lower and upper 27% values calculated to increase the scale’s reliability. The Cronbach Alpha internal consistency coefficient was 0.77 for the overall scale and between 0.65 and 0.67 for the sub-dimensions.