The data on exploratory factor structure of [pre-service] teacher beliefs about educational research scale

This article presents data on factors that depict [pre-service] teacher beliefs about educational research. A cross-sectional survey was used to collect the data that involved 352 final-year students working on their undergraduate theses. The students were registered in the faculty of teacher training and education in one of the private universities with an A (excellent) accreditation in Jakarta, Indonesia. The participants were selected conveniently. Exploratory factor analysis was performed to reveal the factors comprised in the data. 49 out of 72 items formed five factors: negative views about educational research, positive views about educational research, knowledge about educational research, open-mindedness, and accessibility.


Specifications
Education Specific subject area Pre-service teacher, teacher education, teacher beliefs Type of data Table  How data were acquired A cross-sectional survey method was employed to collect the data. The data were derived from a questionnaire. The questionnaire is provided as a supplementary file in this paper. Data format Raw Analyzed Parameters for data collection The cross-sectional survey was adopted to target pre-service teachers who were administratively enrolled as students of the 8th semester or more. Description of data collection A total of 352 pre-service teachers completed this survey, who were selected using a convenience sampling method. The sampling was done at a private university in Jakarta, Indonesia. After the screening process, 352 data were evaluated using the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA). Data source location East Jakarta, DKI Jakarta, Indonesia Data accessibility The data are available in Mendeley Data: https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/fm8hvpd9w7/1

Value of the Data
• One of the factors of gaps between educational research and practices is teacher beliefs about educational research. However, a tool for identifying this problem is still rare. This data describes an exploratory analysis of the factors included in teacher beliefs about educational research. • The data can be useful for researchers who are interested in teacher education and professional teacher development. • It is expected that the data can be used more effectively in further research to collect data on the factors that influence research-based teacher practice. • The data serve as initial attempts to validate the five-factor constructs of teacher beliefs about educational research. • The data can be compared with future research using the questionnaire with groups of inservice teachers.

Data Description
The data were derived from 72 questionnaire items for measuring teacher beliefs about educational research. The questionnaire is provided as a supplementary file in this paper or mendeley data (see http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/fm8hvpd9w7.1 ). Data in this article consists of two parts. The first part (see Table 1 ) is data that comprise factor loadings, mean of each item, and total variance that contribute to each factor. The data also comprises the degree of internal consistency and corrected item-total correlation (CITC). The second part (see Table 2 ) includes the mean of each factor, the standard deviation, and the range. The data also comprises correlations among factors. Table 1 shows that there are five factors in the questionnaire data on teacher beliefs about educational research, namely (1) negative views on educational research, (2) positive views about educational research, (3) knowledge about educational research, (4) open-mindedness and (5) accessibility. The first factor consists of 16 items with a degree of internal consistency of 0.864, the second factor consists of 13 items with a degree of internal consistency of 0.833, the third factor consists of 8 items with a degree of internal consistency of 0.683, and the fourth factor consists of 7 items with a degree of internal consistency of 0.703, and fifth factor consists of 5 items with a degree of internal consistency of 0.561. Table 2 shows that the open-mindedness factor has the highest mean, followed by positive views, knowledge about research, negative views, and accessibility. The strongest correlation is between positive views and open-mindedness.

Experimental Design, Materials and Methods
The data were obtained from participants through a cross-sectional survey. The participants were registered in the faculty of teacher training and education in one of the private universities with an A (Excellent) accreditation in Jakarta, Indonesia. Samples were collected using a convenience sampling method from all students who were officially registered as students of the 8th semester or above, and they were taking undergraduate thesis research data. Three hundred fifty-two participants voluntarily filled out the questionnaire that was distributed online and offline. Their ages ranged between 20 and 24 years old, and 82.4% were males. 52.8% of the participants indicated that they had teaching experiences, while the rest had no teaching experiences. A questionnaire collected the data on teachers' beliefs about research developed by the researchers. Studies on teacher perception about research [1][2][3] were used to develop the questionnaire items. The questionnaire was written in Bahasa Indonesia, and then was validated by three educational experts as well as researchers. The questionnaire draft consisted of 72 items with a 6-point scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree). After the questionnaire was validated by the three experts in educational area, the eight items (i.e. 8, 16, 23, 45, 46, 50, 51, and 55) were revised according to their suggestions. Exploratory factor analysis on 72 items was performed to generate the best-fit factor structure and to reveal the best indicators for measuring each factor. Cronbach's alpha coefficient was computed to check the internal consistency of each factor. The analyses were done using SPSS version 24.

Ethics Statement
This manuscript has not been published elsewhere or it is not under consideration for publication for other journals. The study was conducted by following Universitas Muhammadiyah Prof. Dr. HAMKA's ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from the participants prior to the survey.

Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships which have, or could be perceived to have, influenced the work reported in this article.