Abstract:

Educating science subjects has raised several problems in the past few years both in Hungary and internationally (Ormerod&Duckworth, 1975). One fundamental difficulty is the duality of quantity and quality (Ledbetter 1993, Vosniadou és Ioannides 1999), as a result of which knowledge transfer does not happen, learners have an access only to knowledge with little practical use in everyday life (Bereiter 1984, Csapó – B. Németh 1995, Gerber 2000, Yung et al.2014). The abstractivity of curriculum contents result in students having the feeling of continuous failure (Chrappán 2001, Csapó 2002, Csíkos 2010), and it makes students more and more demotivated. In order to define the main factors of the efficient learning process it is vital to understand the conceptual cognition and use of the subject in concern as well as to carry out research related to students’attitudes.

Several questionnaire surveys have been realized on attitudes towards science subjects in Hungary (Ballér 1973, Báthory 1989, Orosz 1992, Csíkos 2012) and internationally, too (TIMSS and PISA surveys).

Based on the results of these researches it may be concluded that the learning attitudes of science subjects are primarily determined by the intention of students going on with their studies in tertiary education, by their teachers’ teaching methodology and their personality. The teacher’s personality is a key factor as it is in the centre of the whole teaching process (McKinsey and Company 2007).

Within the frame of OTKA project No. K105262 entitled The novel, interdisciplinary approach of science subject pedagogical researches, several surveys have been carried out on secondary school and university students’attitudes to learning science subjects.

In our present research going beyond the frame of using questionnaires we have been applying the method of half structured interviews with the aim of learning more about general attitudes concerning science subjects with the help of exploring school experiences in a retrospective way. During the study approximately 120 university students were questioned about their experiences about studying science subjects at elementary and secondary school. These students spoke about not only their personal experiences but they also gave some advice on how science lessons should be made more popular in order that the teaching-learning process could be more efficient. Analysing the interviews, it turned out that there is a deficiency regarding the methodological diversity of teaching these subjects, as the most dominant form of class management is still frontal. Two thirds of the sample realized that modern skills are more relevant in everyday life but they also highlighted the importance of methodological improvements as well. Some practical pieces of advice were also mentioned, such as teacher’s empathy, helpfulness or patience. Interestingly enough, only few indicated the abundance of subject contents and their being too abstract. At the same time it may be considered as a positive fact that these subjects were mainly described with either neutral or positive adjectives and the complete refusal was less typical.

The analysis of these interviews helped us reveal those factors that predominantly affect attitudes to science subjects, the suggestions must be taken into consideration and used as guidelines for our further researches.

Keywords:

Science attitude, science subjects, interview.