STANDARD ASSESSMENT

TOOLS IN THE AFFECTIVE

DOMAIN
DR. ELA NARVASA-REGONDOLA
Professor IV
Some Assessment Tools in Affective Domain

 Self-Report
 Rating Scales
 Semantic Differential Scales
 Thurstone Scales
 Likert Scales
 Stapel Scales
Some Assessment Tools in Affective Domain

 Self-Report
This is the most common measurement tool in the
affective domain. It essentially requires an individual
to provide an account of his/her attitude or feelings
toward a concept or idea or people. It is sometimes
called “written reflections”.
Some Assessment Tools in Affective Domain

 Rating Scales
This is a set of categories designed to elicit
information about a quantitative attribute in social
science. Common examples are the Likert scale and
1-10 rating scales.
Some Assessment Tools in Affective Domain

 Semantic Differential Scales (SD)

This scale tries to assess an individual’s reaction
to specific words, ideas or concepts in terms of
ratings on bipolar scales defined with contrasting
adjectives at each end.
Some Assessment Tools in Affective Domain

 Semantic Differential Scales (SD)

Example:

Good ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Bad

3 2 1 0 1 2 3
Boring ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Interesting
Some Assessment Tools in Affective Domain

 Semantic Differential Scales (SD)

Usually, the position marked 0 is labeled
“neutral”, the 1 positions are labeled “slightly,” the 2
positions “quite,” and the 3 positions extremely”.
Hence, 3 close to good means extremely good and a
3 close to bad means, extremely bad.
Some Assessment Tools in Affective Domain

 Thurstone Scales
Thurstone is considered the father of attitude
measurement. has a number of “agree” or “disagree”
statements. It is a unidimensional scale to measure attitudes
towards people. Developing the scale is time consuming and
relatively complex compared to other scales (like the Likert
scale);
Some Assessment Tools in Affective Domain

 Thurstone Scales
Although there are technically three scales, when
people refer to the “Thurstone Scale” they’re usually
talking about the method of equal-appearing intervals.
It’s called “Equal appearing intervals” because when you
choose the items for your test (see Step 6 below), you’re
picking items equally spaced apart. The other two
variations are:
Some Assessment Tools in Affective Domain

 Thurstone Scales
The method of successive intervals: this method is more
challenging to implement than equal-appearing intervals.
The method of paired comparisons: requires twice the judgments
than the equal-appearing intervals method and can quickly become
very consuming.
The three methods differ in their construction, but still result in the
same Agree/Disagree quiz given to respondents.
Some Assessment Tools in Affective Domain

 Likert Scales
A Likert scale measures agreement or disagreement to a
particular statement. The scale ranges from “strongly agree”
to “disagree” with neutral in the center. You can easily
quantify the results. It’s usual for the highest agreement to be
rated a 5, neutral as 3 and the lowest agreement or no
agreement.
Some Assessment Tools in Affective Domain

 Likert Scales
This makes it easy to compare results. An example of a
Likert scale question would be:
My job is drudgery.
Strongly disagree / Disagree / Neutral / Agree / Strongly
Agree
Some Assessment Tools in Affective Domain

 Stapel Scales
 Stapel Scale is a unipolar (one adjective) rating scale
designed to measure the respondent’s attitude towards the
object or event. The scale is comprised of 10
categories ranging from –5 to +5 without any neutral
point (zero).
Some Assessment Tools in Affective Domain

 Stapel Scales
The stapel scale got its name after its developer Jan
Stapel. The scale is usually constructed vertically with a
single adjective in the middle of the range of values (-5 to
+5). The respondent is asked to select the appropriate
numerical response category that best describes the extent to
which the adjective related to the object is accurate or
inaccurate.
Some Assessment Tools in Affective Domain

 Stapel Scales
The higher the positive score selected by the respondent,
the more accurate the adjective describes the object and vice
versa.
For example, the respondent is asked to rank the quality
of food, and crew member service of an airline on a scale
ranging from -5 to +5:
Some Assessment Tools in Affective Domain

 Stapel Scales
Some Assessment Tools in Affective Domain

 Stapel Scales
From the above example, the airline is evaluated as
having a high food quality but somewhat a poor cabin crew
service.
The stapel scale is like a semantic differential scale with
little modifications. It is often used in the situations when
two bi-polar adjectives are difficult to find out. The data
obtained are the interval and are analyzed in the same
manner as the semantic differential data.
Some Assessment Tools in Affective Domain

 Stapel Scales
One of the advantages of the stapel scale is that it does
not require the pre-testing of adjectives to ensure their true
bipolarity. Also, it can be easily administered over the
telephone. But, however, some researcher finds the stapel
scale to be quite complex and confusing.