This study aimed to develop and validate an inventory that measures the whole range of basic and integrated science process skills as stipulated in the Malaysian science curricula and that is suitable for Malaysian lower secondary school students. The validated inventory was subsequently utilised to determine the differential acquisition of science process skills by gender, location, and ethnicity. In the instrument development phase which involves item generation and field testing, a reliable 60-item Malaysian-Based Basic and Integrated Science Process Skills Inventory (MB-BISPSI) that has a KR-20 reliability of 0.88, difficulty indices of items that range between 0.25-0.75 and discrimination indices which are above 0.4 was produced. In the main causal-comparative study using a sample of 1021 Form 2 students (548 girls and 473 boys) from seven (four rural and three interior) out of the eight secondary schools in Kapit Division, Sarawak, the findings indicate that the students achieved.....

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Science educators have strongly recommended that paper-and-pencil group testing format be used to measure process skills competency, which can be administered efficiently and objectively without requiring expensive resources. This paper reports the use of an authordeveloped psychometrically-supported Malaysian-Based Basic and Integrated Science Process Skills Inventory (MB-BISPSI) to gauge the acquisition of science process skills amongst 1021 Form 2 students (548 girls and 473 boys) from seven (four rural and three interior) secondary schools in Kapit Division, Sarawak, exploring the interaction effects of gender, ethnicity, and school location. The findings indicated that the students achieved a mastery level which fell short of the two-third benchmark for the overall science process skills, basic and integrated science process skills, and also for each of the specific 12 science process skills. Additionally, gender-ethnicity interaction effect was found to be statistically significa.....

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