Construction and Standardization of a Mental Imagery Scale for Secondary Level Students

Abstract

Mental Imagery is the process of creating or re-creating an experience in a person’s mind by employing all the senses. The Mental Imagery Scale was developed based on established theoretical and measurement frameworks in the field of mental imagery, including seminal work on vividness of visual imagery, early psychometric approaches to imagery assessment, and dual-coding theory emphasizing the interaction between verbal and visual cognitive systems. The main objective of the present study was to construct and standardize a Mental Imagery Scale for measuring Mental Imagery of Secondary Level Students. The researcher constructed the draft Mental Imagery Scale consisted of 90 items using 3-point rating scale on the basis of 6 (three) selected areas of mental imagery. These are viz. Visual, Auditory, Gustatory, Olfactory, Tactual and Bodily imagery. All the 6 areas of mental imagery included 2 dimensions: Vividness of Mental Images and Clarity of Mental Images. The draft Mental Imagery Scale was consisted of 90 statements which were subjected to 5 experts’ suggestions. On the basis of the suggestions and recommendations of experts 11 items were dropped, the out the remaining selected 79 items, 9 items were partially modified. The draft Mental Imagery Scale was administered on a sample of 158 Secondary Level Students for item analysis. The final draft Mental Imagery Scale which was administered on 134 sample Secondary level students from 1 Government Secondary school (76= Boys 30+Girls 46), from 1 Private Secondary school (58= Boys 32, Girls 26). The study was limited to secondary-level students from selected Government and Private schools of Namsai District, Arunachal Pradesh. In the present study, t-value was calculated for the final selection of the items. The items having which yielded t-value 1.75 or more were retained to include in the final version of the Mental Imagery Scale for Secondary level. The statements of this scale were constructed in both English and Hindi language. The final scale consisted of 70 statements using 3-point rating scale on the basis of 6 (three) selected areas of mental imagery. The Split-half reliability coefficient of the scale was found to be .88, the Test-retest reliability coefficient was found to be .78 and the Cronbach Alpha reliability coefficient was found to be .79. In order to determine the validity of this scale, the researcher presented it to a number of experts in the field of seeking judgement regarding the content coverage of the scale and it was considered to have satisfactory content validity. The results suggest that the Mental Imagery Scale is a reliable and content-valid instrument for measuring mental imagery among secondary level students and may be effectively used for research and educational purposes.