Attitude towards School Science in Primary Education in Spain

Vol. 19, No. 4, 2017 Attitude towards School Science in Primary Education in Spain Actitud hacia las clases de Ciencias Naturales en la educación primaria en España Raquel Fernández Cézar (*) Natalia Solano Pinto (*) (*) Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (Received: May 10, 2016; accepted for publishing: June 9, 2016) How to cite: Fernández, R., & Solano, N. (2017). Attitude towards school science in primary education in Spain. Revista Electrónica de Investigación Educativa, 19(4), 112-123. https://doi.org/10.24320/redie.2017.19.4.1393 Abstract This report shows Spanish elementary school students’ attitude towards school science. The analysis is performed through a questionnaire with a sample consisting of 183 10 to 12-year-old students. The association of this attitude with factors like sex, age, school environment and teachers’ use of experiments has been researched. The results show a positive attitude towards school science, and null association with sex or age. Besides that, there is an association between school environment and attitude: the students with the most positive attitude values belong to rural schools. A sex bias is observed in the group of students with the most positive attitude, with girls making up the majority. The small size of this reduced sample limits the impact of this conclusion. A difference in the perception of experiments is observed between teachers and students. Attitude towards school science is not associated with students’ perception of experiments in science classes. Keywords: Elementary Education, Sciences, Experiments, Student attitude. Resumen Este trabajo muestra la actitud hacia las clases de Ciencias Naturales en Primaria. Los resultados se obtuvieron mediante un cuestionario realizado a 183 estudiantes de entre 10 y 12 años. Se ha investigado la asociación de la actitud con relación al sexo, edad, entorno escolar y empleo de experimentos en las clases. Los resultados muestran una actitud positiva; no existe asociación con el sexo o la edad, y sí con el entorno escolar, siendo más positiva en el entorno rural. Entre el subgrupo de estudiantes con actitud más positiva son más numerosas las chicas, no siendo concluyente este resultado por el tamaño muestral. Asimismo, entre los estudiantes y los maestros de primaria existe una percepción diferente sobre “qué es un experimento”, y no se observa que la actitud de los estudiantes se relacione con su percepción sobre la presencia de dichos experimentos en las clases de ciencias. Palabras clave: Educación primaria, Enseñanza de las ciencias, Experimentos, Actitud del estudiante. Attitude towards school science in primary education in Spain Fernández & Solano I. Introduction Attitude is a cognitive, affective and behavioral predisposition with respect to any issue. Such a tendency is not natural but acquired (Rodríguez & Seoane, 1989) and individually developed through models, that is, through mental visions of a social issue, which are influenced by cultural beliefs (Morales, 2007). When the issue is science, we refer to the attitude towards science. The relationship between student attitude towards science and interest in scientific content is reported by several authors (Klug, Krause, Schober, Finsterwald & Spiel, 2014). All these studies reveal that the more positive the student attitude towards science, the deeper the interest in scientific content. In a PISA report on Spanish students’ results, one of the conclusions reached is that student attitude towards the subject matter is crucial in guaranteeing outstanding academic achievement (Instituto Nacional de Evaluación Educativa [National Institute of Educational Evaluation] (INEE), 2013). This positive attitude is also reflected in the development of practical and logical reasoning abilities (Prieto-Patiño & VeraMaldonado, 2008; Huey-Por et al., 2011), and not only in achievement. Studies on student attitude towards science (Pelcastre, Gómez & Zavala, 2015) show that although students find some positive aspects in science at school level, they are not willing to start studying science majors. As a consequence, there has been a decline in the number of students enrolled at university in science, technology, engineering and mathematics ( STEM) majors in the western world (National Science Education Standards, 1996; Vázquez & Manassero, 2008). 1.1 Theoretical framework Attitude towards Science. Several authors have considered the attitude towards science by examining different aspects: the social and geographical context, and the social perspective. The study offering the widest scope in this respect on the European continent was ROSE (available at http://www.uv.uio.no/ils/?vrtx=search&query=ROSE), carried out in 2004 by Schreiner and Sjøberg. The sample was made up of 15-year-old students from 40 countries. The questionnaire was developed by an experts’ committee and included 10 aspects of science in student life. The results are similar to those obtained in other international projects in developed countries: most of the students find science important in their lives but are not inclined to continue studying science in the future. Nevertheless, similar studies carried out in developing countries show that students like science, and a greater number show an interest in continuing to study science in future courses (Schreiner & Sjøberg, 2004). In the Spanish context the reported results follow the same tendency as in developed countries (PrietoPatiño & Vera-Maldonado, 2008). As far as we know, there are no studies on the analysis of the attitude towards science at school, or school science, which is the focus of this report. Factors. There are numerous studies on the identification of factors affecting attitude towards science (Marbá-Tallada & Vazquez, 2010). These factors belong to different categories: some are external to school, like school environment, sex and age; others are inherent to it, like curriculum design and teacher instruction. With regard to the influence of sex, studies in the Spanish context (Prieto-Patiño & Vera, 2008; MarbàTallada & Márquez, 2010) report a null sex effect. We will analyze if this factor affects attitude towards school science. Regarding the effects of age on attitude, the association is reported in several studies conducted in different countries (Pelcastre et al., 2015). The effect of age is that the older the student, the worse the attitude towards science. Nonetheless, other studies (Prieto-Patiño & Vera-Maldonado, 2008; Vázquez & Manassero, 2008), performed with 12 to 18-year-old Spanish students, indicate no influence at all from age (Vázquez & Manassero, 2009; Marbà-Tallada & Márquez, 2010; Pelcastre et al., 2015). Since no studies are reported that analyze the attitude towards school science at the very beginning of adolescence, Revista Electrónica de Investigación Educativa, Vol. 19, No. 4 / IIDE-UABC 113 Attitude towards school science in primary education in Spain Fernánd (...truncated)