Abstract:

Teaching science was a real success story in the Hungarian education system, and from the late 1970’s we had a relatively nice position even in international surveys. However, after a series of PISA and competence surveys the results tended to decline. Nowadays, unfortunately, we must speak about the crisis of this area. The reasons for the phenomenon are seen differently by the actors, which indicate the complexity of this issue.

It has been evident for a while that learning, or in a narrower sense, classroom environment attitudes are dominant factors (Osborne, 2003; Myers & Fouth, 1997), and we also have data concerning the fact that personal support to students, diverse methodology and non-standard learner activities have the most important effect on students’ attitudes (Moorhead et.al., 2015; Cutting & Kelly, 2015; Venville et. al., 2010).

We carried out our survey among 18 secondary schools, involving 2915 students providing sociological variables as well as panels on subject attitudes, learning motivation factors, preference, teacher’s methods, their personal attitudes and educational tools (5-rank Likert scale based questions, Cronbach-α values between 0,83-0,96,).

In our paper we would like to indicate those primary data and correlations that exist regarding the judgement of subject attitudes, applied learning methods and educational tools as well as subject content.

Our data were collected with the help of paper-based questionnaires and the statistical analysis was carried using the SPSS 22 software. Our data show that science are in a rather low position of the rank, and we may conclude that secondary school students are able to make difference between judging their teachers, the lesson’s methodological environment and the effect of the subject material.

There is a significant difference between the preference of life science (biology, geography) and other science subjects (physics, chemistry), the latter ones are ranked in the last 2 or 3 positions of the rank list, while biology and geography can be found in the first third of the list.

According to our assumptions learner-active methods (group work, online tasks, problem solving) and the elements of teacher’s qualities (professional knowledge, methodological culture, positive personality) have a strong impact on students’ subject attitudes. The data, however, did not or just slightly underpin the hypotheses.

Subject attitudes in secondary schools can be explained with some pragmatic reasons, like students’ motivation to go on to higher education or the usefulness of the subject. It was surprising that the learner-active methods (group work, problem solving, learner’s experiments) showed weak correlations with subject attitudes, whereas the passive methods had no effect on attitudes at all. Attitudes are mainly influenced by teacher’s qualities, especially clear explanations (r: 0,32-0,557, depending on the subject) and raising interest (r: 0,446-0,565, depending on the subject).

Our results may provide solid research background for thorough curriculum reform and also for the modernisation of teacher training methodological views.

Further parts of the survey will be able to show the organizational effects of the institutes as well.

Keywords:

Subject attitude, teaching science, learner’s motivation.